


Landlocked and coastwise

by LittleDesertFlower



Series: Adversity [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Day At The Beach, F/F, Fluff, Major Original Character(s), Not Beta Read, One Shot, Original World-Building, Post-Canon, Sea Town, Slice of Life, Smut, Song Lyrics, a Very Long OneTM, in very small quantities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 22:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21260585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: Set in 1919, a few months after the conflict with Drachma has been resolved, Olivier takes her first vacation in twenty years, letting Zinnia talk her into going to the coast for a few days to eat, sleep, and, incidentally … rekindle the relationship that the Briggs snows have frozen a little as of late.Requires knowledge of its parent ficThe Flower That Blooms In Adversity.





	Landlocked and coastwise

As it turned out, the world didn’t end past the borders of Amestris. Zinnia had known, of course, that what awaited beyond was just as solid as her own country, but experience spoke more firmly than lines drawn on a piece of paper with names atop the shapes in it, and she had never left the place that she had always called home.

North had always been where the enemy hid, east where the desert covered all until the cherry trees of Xing ate away all sign of it, west where Creta gave way to Obol, south the lands where Aerugo stretched on. But southwest awaited two countries only ever touched by the sea and those countries adjacent to Amestris. Obol, the country closest to Drachma, less dangerous but no less threatening, and Chalybes, a small country no bigger than Amestris that lived off the Selenic Ocean bathing its southern coasts. That was where Zinnia and Olivier were headed for the summer. Indefinitely.

Olivier hated that word, Zinnia knew that well. It had taken her a long, long time after the war with Drachma had been well over to convince Olivier to take time off.

“You can’t exactly sign up for vacation in the army,” Olivier had said, arms crossed as she lounged on her chair. Ever the image of quietude and wisdom, no matter if she was merely being defiant because she could.

Zinnia had just sat on Olivier’s desk, scattering all paperwork over her thighs, and raised an eyebrow at her.

“It’s been four years, it’s not like you can’t ask for a few favors. They owe you.”

The war to end all wars—except those north, of course—would have granted Olivier a far more luxurious and comfortable life than she would have ever been able to imagine, but she had chosen to go back to Briggs to kick Drachman ass and build a new memory of the place for the next generations.

“I am needed in order to defend the north.”

“No,” Zinnia had said patiently. “_You_ are the one that needs to defend the north. But, tell me, what is there to defend it against now, huh? The truce stands, there’s been no incidents in a long time. Why not just … take a breather?”

Olivier held her gaze, puppy-like and definitely much more innocent than Zinnia truly was, for a few moments, then dropped it with a sigh.

“_Fine,_” she said. “And where do you propose I do that?”

All it had taken was a phone call to Central, to the Armstrong mansion, and Philip himself had gone on for a few minutes about perfect vacation destinations. Ever since his first visit to Xing, he and his wife had taken a liking to travelling, and he had plenty to say about what the world had to offer.

And, so, here they were, the victors of one of the longest wars in living memory, on a train to the town that was on the last southern spot on Chalybes, Haling Cove. And Zinnia was incapable of not drinking everything in. This was the second day of travelling, after having taken a train to Central the day before and spending the night in the Armstrong mansion, and despite her energy being a bit decadent, there was nothing in the changing landscapes that the windows offered that Zinnia wasn’t enthusiastic about. She’d spent the morning glued to the window, seeing the different areas of Amestris fade into the browns and yellows of the fields of Creta.

“I don’t think the human being is fit to spend so long in the same place, without moving,” Olivier said, interrupting her thoughts about what Chalybes would be like. It was one thing to read about it in books or fliers than to have it right there in her reach, but Olivier didn’t understand leisure. Even this vacation was just another shape duty took for her.

“You’re always free to take a little stroll.”

“The train is barely long enough for a _stroll_.”

Zinnia held herself back, a hairsbreadth short of saying playfully that how come she felt so caged when she’d spent a little more over four years stuck inside Briggs without complaint.

“I have a couple of books I can lend you,” she said instead. “To pass the time.”

Olivier just shook her head.

“Just tell me we’re almost there.”

But it was far too bright outside for that to be true. The train was scheduled to arrive to the harbor town just a little before the darkness englobed the horizon.

“A few more hours. You can do this.”

“I’m _bored,_” Olivier stated as if Zinnia didn’t already know.

She couldn’t help but laugh.

“You’re honestly endearing like this. Forty years old and still complaining like a little girl. Do I need to tuck you in for your midday nap?”

Olivier snorted, for a second a little more entertained than before.

“Don’t try me.”

“We could play I Spy!”

“I am going to pretend you did not just say that in front of me.”

Giggling, Zinnia left her seat in front of Olivier and accommodated herself on her lap as if she did this every day of her life in the empty compartments of a train.

“If I’m the little girl, why are you on _top _of me?”

“You know why…” Zinnia mouthed.

After so long, Olivier did know. Very well, indeed. And she also knew that right where they were and taking into account their previous history, this would end well. Her smirk grew all over her face and her hands wandered over Zinnia’s torso and waist until they settled on her bare thighs.

“I could nap with you here,” she said. Nap and other things, if the day was a little darker, the train a little less crowded… The image of the door to their compartment opening any minute now as one of the in-train staff came to offer them a drink didn’t exactly please her.

“If that’s what it takes,” Zinnia said. “Because I really was not ready for I Spy with you. You’d either crush me or embarrass yourself.”

Olivier pushed her legs away until Zinnia sat by her side. She crossed her arms and got comfortable on her seat, closing her eyes.

“Just read me something, will you?”

Immediately, Zinnia fished in her bag for some content that was worth reading out loud. Some books aren’t meant to be voiced, their words eternal through something far more powerful and enticing than the sounds of human vocal folds. But some possessed a sonority made infinitely more beautiful by vocalizing it, especially in front of a loved one.

Zinnia, when fazed with the immediateness of travelling, knew to bring books with her. They served as a pillow for a head that is tired and demands rest against something soft, nothing alike the hard-cold glass it would lay on otherwise.

Her hands rummaged quickly through her possessions. Thick books with souls of their own, whispers of the heart turned ink and paper, and stories interwoven so beautifully one might think they had never been written, only ever magicked into existence.

“Mystery? Poetry?” She looked up at Olivier. “_Romance_?”

But Olivier didn’t open her eyes. Her breathing was even more relaxed than before, her head only held upright by the wall behind her neck. But she was not asleep just yet, it always took more than it seemed to lull Olivier Armstrong into the open mouths of the night.

“Something sleep-inducing…”

It reaped a smile from Zinnia’s lips. Her grumpy insomniac of a general, asking to be read a bedtime story before sleeping, just like a little girl in one of those fairy-tales that made of the real world something much more fantastical.

“And this is how she uses me to fall asleep, therefore leaving me alone to deal with hours of travelling.”

“You know you’re dying to fangirl over the landscape without me bitching in the background,” Olivier’s monotone voice reached her.

Zinnia laughed because it was so true, but she opened a book and started reading anyway.

_Once upon a time…_

Just to tease her, Zinnia had started a story with mystery embedded into its every word, hoping to keep Olivier engaged enough that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but halfway through she realized there was nothing more despicable in this world than depriving Olivier of her sleep. So, slowly, Zinnia incorporated her own words into the story and turned it into what all her stories were: love letters.

Olivier fell asleep before she could notice the change, head sliding slowly towards the glass, and Zinnia smiled warmly at the sight of such a lethal woman at her most vulnerable. Perhaps she wouldn’t devote as much time to watching the landscape pass her by as she would to loving Olivier silently, in the short distance that separated them.

Zinnia sighed.

Six years they’d shared the same rooms, both looking in the same direction, tracing back and forth the information that would save the future of the north. But had they once stopped to look at one another? Their relationship stood, mightier than their victory over Drachma, but when had been the last time they had tended to it?

When had been the last time that their skins had met, their eyes fought for dominance?

The last ‘I love you’ was a milestone of the past.

Perhaps this trip would help them find those old parts of each other again in ways that the war hadn’t been able to. 

* * *

Their footsteps were almost the only ones echoing through the station. Zinnia had waited until the train had been completely emptied before she’d woken Olivier up, and so they had become the very last passengers to disembark. The quiet disagreed with their ears, after so many hours used to the gentle ruckus of the train moving, and the dark difficulted the navigation through the station.

“Do you think there’ll still be some kind of transportation service available at this hour?”

Zinnia bit her lip. It wasn’t that late, so in theory things should have still run more or less smoothly. Perhaps there would be a taxi or a carriage waiting for the passengers of the last Amestrian train.

“Let’s go outside and we’ll see.”

“I hope we won’t have to walk…”

“Don’t be like that.”

Once they reached the orange and yellowish light of the streets, they didn’t see any sort of car or vehicle around. Olivier dropped their luggage on the ground and rubbed at her fingers.

“Walking, it is…” she said. “D’you know how far away it is?”

“Yeah, lemme just …” Zinnia handed Olivier her own bag to hold for a minute, then proceeded to look through the items in it, muttering to herself. After a few seconds, she fished out a folded piece of paper with the address on it. “Okay, so according to this it’s not far. Just a few streets—” She spun around until she found the direction she meant to point towards. “—down there and we’ll find it no problem.”

“Creepy...” Olivier mumbled.

“What? I’m good at this.”

“No, yeah, I can see that. Still creepy.”

Zinnia sighed in exasperation, getting her things back and leading her way.

“If the hotel is meant to be more or less at the heart of the town and we’re in the train station and _there’_s the sea,” she said pointing at the dark horizon where Olivier would just have to imagine the ocean flowing, “then there’s not a lot of places where it could be.”

Not a long time after, through narrow streets of cobblestone and closed-down shops, Zinnia stopped, panting slightly, in front of a four-story building that was nothing like the others, which were lower and thicker, mostly constructed to serve doubly as houses and shops. This hotel seemed to have been sculpted somewhere else, then promptly placed there, clearly for tourists to enjoy, not the locals.

“Here?” Olivier said, her breath as regular and normal as ever.

Zinnia tried not to hate her for it. No matter how much she worked out, Olivier’s physical condition was just not reproducible.

“Yup.”

“Let’s go in. I’m starving.”

And in they went. A few steps into the hotel and Zinnia immediately forgot where she was, the furnishing of the foyer was so different from what one might hope to find in a harbor town such as this one. It was a hotel, alright, meant to distance the tourist from the reality that awaited just a few walls away. And it did so very well, with exquisite rugs and exotic plants as well as a slightly baroque touch in the choice of décor, especially the paintings hung on the walls.

There was a reception desk to add to that, the only well-illuminated place in the whole room, so they walked towards it. Despite the hour, they were able to obtain the key to their room in no time, although, much to Olivier’s dismay, dinner had been already served.

As loudly as her stomach was growling, she ignored it.

Room 203 was a very normal room. Zinnia had absolutely refused to book suites. She and Olivier were more than used to accommodations the average person would find uncomfortable, so she’d seen no reason why to indulge on rich amenities now. What they needed was a touch of the reality they’d missed after all those years fighting a war.

She got all the lights going—electrical, a modern amenity that these days most establishments were investing on—while Olivier got rid of the luggage on the double-bed and opened the windows. One thing Zinnia had learned about her was that the woman found anything above 50 degrees was extremely hot for her. And since summer had already begun to shine a little bit more intensely on the southern parts of the continent, Olivier was now all about chasing away the heat.

Now, she lay down on the bed, arms and legs widely spread, and exhaled loudly. Her stomach grumbled shortly after, making Zinnia laugh out loud.

“Get up, let’s find that tummy something to eat, shall we?”

But Olivier just inhaled deeply and kept looking at the ceiling, her body in the same relaxed state as that of a child’s after a long day wishing to lay on a soft mattress.

“Do we have to?”

Zinnia promptly grabbed Olivier’s hand, which was hanging out the edge of the bed, and pulled a little.

“Come on,” she said. “I’m not putting up with your irascible hunger all night long.”

“What if there’s nothing open?”

“I’ll get into the sea and fish you something myself,” Zinnia said, almost laughing.

Back in the day, she remembered hanging out with Roy and Riza. To be polite, Riza had asked about Olivier’s broken arm, and in her absence Zinnia had replied. Then, Roy had seen his chance, and the reunion had quickly become a roast of the world’s crankiest general. Zinnia remembered Roy saying that Olivier could be such a child sometimes, at her most dramatic. Zinnia had only been able to concur. Right now, she would have liked to see General Mustang putting up with this.

After a theatrical sigh, Olivier did rise, slowly, like a wave.

Soon, she realized than more than a quest for food this was about sating Zinnia’s bottomless curiosity. Every step they took got them further into town. Around the parks, closer to the center, and deep into the many serpentine streets. The city buzzed quietly in its core, less active than in the mornings and afternoons, and the yellow lights coming from inside the establishments along the narrow and uneven sidewalks proved that Olivier’s assumptions about schedule conflict were wrong. In fact, they had plenty of small places to choose from. Yet Zinnia kept walking, relentless. On and on and on. And Olivier, in this darkness, would no longer know where to turn if she wanted to head back to the hotel.

“Do you even _know_ where you’re going?” Olivier asked.

“Somewhere without bald men drinking loudly.”

“That doesn’t exist.”

“I just am not interested in deafening music and cheap beer and many fishermen talking around a game of cards.”

“That’s … weirdly specific,” Olivier said.

Zinnia smiled. “What can I say? I prefer to sit down somewhere nice with my girl.”

Olivier shook her head but said nothing. _My girl… _Four years was a long time, words like those helped make them seem like a lot less. And at least that touch of affection reassured Olivier that her feelings about it weren’t far-fetched and ridiculous. It proved that Zinnia was _trying, _too, damn it. Things like those required mutual effort.

Perhaps that was why Olivier took her hand in hers, casually. Wars erased gestures the same way they did lives, day by day, shot after shot. Eventually, the erosion of it chilled many things away.

“Then I’ll quench my hunger for you,” Olivier replied.

And she did, in many more ways than one.

In the end, their feet having withstood some more gentle ambling past streets and corners they hardly could see in the night, Zinnia nodded enthusiastically at the door of some tiny place that was less crowded than the others. Music did seem to be play inside, but the tone was much less ‘downtown bar’ than it was ‘ballad to enliven the night’, and it was almost as if it strove to invite you in, tie you up in its nest made of chords and words, and let you breathe it all in.

_Well, she was standing in the bar_

_I said, "Hello, how do you do?"_

_She handed me a beer …_

A small group of people talked animatedly in one corner of the square place, and another, much more reduced, drank at the bar. Olivier quickly felt her pulse quicken and soon marked her territory by sitting a few stools too close, her chiseled arms bare for everyone to see. Zinnia, small as she was, had to hop to occupy a place next to her.

A woman around Olivier’s age with a lovely scar the color of sunrise, which covered her right eyebrow to the line of jaw, smiled at Olivier instantly, leaning on the bar.

“What can I get you, love?” she said in perfect Amestrian.

Olivier, far from looking surprised that the local had just picked up that fast on the two of them being from the north, moved her hair away from her face nonchalantly.

“Beer,” she just said. “And roasted potatoes.”

She turned slightly to Zinnia, who quickly said:

“Just some water for me, thank you.”

The bartender looked at Zinnia like she had just realized she was there.

“Oh, sorry,” she said at once, blushing slightly. “Right away.”

She disappeared for a moment, crouching to get clean glasses from the bottom shelves behind her, and Zinnia elbowed Olivier and mouthed playfully:

“She was _flirting_ with you.”

Olivier had this gift, only ever perfect after years and years of practice. It was that of knowing precisely how to move every muscle of her face to convey the most complex of emotions or, alternatively, have her entire expression be the closest thing to pissed-off neutral. She made that exact face now and it took all the dignity Zinnia had, stored somewhere close to her decency in public, not to laugh like a maniac.

“People do that, yes.”

“Of course they do!”

The bartender emerged now, slamming a glass and a jar of beer on the bar and taking off with a smile to bury herself in the conversation from the old men on the other side of the bar for a moment before going into the kitchen to get Olivier her potatoes.

“It’s just weird to see it in action,” Zinnia continued.

For a second, Olivier’s face failed at neutrality with a memory of times as old as the war with Drachma.

“Miles used to do that when I thought I wasn’t paying attention…”

“Yeah,” Zinnia agreed, sipping her water. “But Miles doesn’t count. The poor man didn’t know he was doing it.”

“And this woman does?”

“Uh-huh. What did you think the ‘sorry’ was for? It was ‘sorry for hitting on you in front of your girlfriend’.”

“And you’re not put off by that?”

Zinnia crossed her legs very demurely on her stool.

“Why would I be put off? It’s nice to be reassured that I have good taste.”

“Stop flirting with me, Zinnia, it’s unbecoming.” She had used her commanding voice, the one from those first days in Iver, when spring had hit them both in the chest quite hard.

Zinnia muffled a chuckle.

“Good taste, she says…” Olivier muttered to herself.

_And I made her laugh, I made a pass_

_I showed her my half-dollar ring_

_She said, "That's pretty cool_

_But classy girls don't kiss in bars, you fool"_

“I didn’t land the best-looking soldier in all of Amestris for you to get judgmental at me now,” Zinnia said, still stifling the earthquakes of her laughter. She turned a little on her stool to look at Olivier. Elbows on the table, her hands joined just beneath her chin. She was a portrait upon which the gift of life had been bestowed. “Olivier,” she said, loud enough that no nuance of her voice would get lost to the lull of the music in Chalybese around them. “You’re pretty, okay? Take a compliment.”

But all Olivier took was a long gulp of her beer. She tried very hard not to smash the glass in her fingers. So much was coursing through her veins in this very instant that she would have if she hadn’t paid attention. It was one thing to have people under her flirting in her direction, aware that those empty words would never reach their recipient in the way they intended to. But being here, in the middle of nowhere, with this goddamn sexy music playing and an attractive woman winking at her and calling her pretty only made her more aware of the woman sitting next to her in her sundress, always yellow, always flowery. The woman Olivier should have already learned to pine for.

_Pretty? _Olivier could turn that word around in seconds and aim it at the mouth that had uttered it like a javelin.

When her food came, she devoured, true to her reputation in Amestris. Zinnia asked to steal just a few bites from her, and Olivier only allowed it because she knew Zinnia hadn’t eaten either, although she didn’t seem terribly pressed to now.

But Zinnia had only asked to break the silence between them, a silence she felt responsible for having created. One word and Olivier hadn’t even responded. This wasn’t supposed to be a fight, none of this was supposed to in any way mimic the life they already knew well enough. Nevertheless, here she was, trying to rechannel the conversation into something harmless. Even so, Zinnia had tried the steaming-hot potatoes, but Olivier hadn’t opened her mouth again.

When they were done, they didn’t linger much. It had been a long couple of days and the thought of a cool bed waiting for them was enough to even make Olivier eager to walk the distance back to the hotel after a meal.

The bartender said goodbye very effusively, but this time Zinnia did not smile. Something had gone wrong because of Zinnia being too cool with that earlier.

_I asked her, "Why?" and she replied_

_It was nothing I was doing wrong, it's just what it is_

_No, classy girls don't kiss in bars like this_

Once outside, she and Olivier started to walk without direction again, more slowly this time, no longer pressed by hunger cramps. But the emotion had been torn away from the scenery. Zinnia couldn’t find joy in what little the lampposts let her see. She wondered over and over again what could have gone wrong and if her being okay with things was really what _had_ gone wrong.

“Are you mad?” Zinnia dared to ask, timidly as it was, a while later. Finally, the town had fallen silent with the closing of the establishments and the last lights being turned off for the night. The breeze and their footsteps were the only sounds around them.

“No, I’m not mad,” Olivier said, almost amused that Zinnia would think so when it was quite the contrary. She was ecstatic inside, hungering to do things she hadn’t done in a long time, and very much aware that the attraction that had bloomed like the spring all those years ago remained right where they’d first found it. “It’s just—” She debated whether she should tell Zinnia this. The words she would say would be something intimate, improper for this conversation. Olivier feared that if she misspoke, her utterance might ruin _this. _The vacation Zinnia had worked so hard on, for the sake of their mental health_. _But didn’t the choice to keep it quiet, keep it pushed down inside, wind up being as detrimental to her mental health as ruining the trip? “It’s just—it’s been a while. Since … you know. _Anything._”

_It’s been a while since I had to fight for control in front of you. _A long, long while in which the strains of war had driven most impulses out of the two of them until they’d forgotten how it felt to have them with the body being fully receptive to them, because it had no other stimuli that required urgent tending to.

“Do you need me to flirt with you more?” Zinnia said, blushing all of a sudden. “Is—is that it? Because I have no problem with that.”

Olivier shook her head, smiling to herself, and took Zinnia’s hands in her own.

“Classy girls don’t do what I—” She took a deep breath, feeling the air fill the holes in her where hesitance lay. “—what I kept thinking of doing with you in that bar.”

“Oh.” Now, definitely, Zinnia’s blush had a reason to be. And memories to draw the warm blood beneath her cheeks from. It didn’t help that Olivier seemed to be towering over her, every second a bit closer, leaning in. “Well, if it helps, neither of us is classy.”

And they had never been.

Zinnia cleared her throat, feeling Olivier everywhere in her body except in her actual skin. She knew how to work with closeness, how to make it their whole world until they were both aching to close it down with their bodies.

“Just for … clarification, though,” she said. “You—you mean that bartender flirting with you only made you … focus on me _more_?”

“I find no other logical explanation.”

Even though there were many other possible explanations for Olivier’s sudden silence, Zinnia reacted to this very one, biting down on her lip so as not to behave like a nubile schoolgirl in love with the new exchange student.

Her voice, though, sounded exactly as if she was talking to that exotic newcomer in the middle of a crowded room with her friends in the corner, urging her on in silence.

“Interesting to know, yes. _Very._” She nodded energetically.

This was a conversation that they should take to bed, unless they wanted to, once again, argue about public displays of affection and what definitely accounted as something more risqué. It had been a recurrent conversation, even when there had been no public displays of that affection anymore. Right now, Olivier wouldn’t have argued for very long, just to get on Zinnia’s nerves a little bit more as she slowly maneuvered her against a wall. But she wanted to be the better woman and head back to that hotel.

She broke Zinnia free of her own essence for a moment to look around. As expected, she recognized nothing in her sight. Every inch of her surroundings could have very well been the same as it was a few yards away and she couldn’t have told the difference.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asked.

The normal tone of her voice relaxed Zinnia, bringing her back to the reality she’d been almost floating away from in her own mind. She was grateful for the momentary burst of clarity going through her when Olivier moved further away. Zinnia glanced up at the stars, brighter here than in any city of Amestris, although never clearer than in Briggs.

She snorted.

“I’m _me, _we’re not getting lost.”

Even here, in a city she hadn’t studied, in a country she didn’t know, Zinnia would find her way as long as there were stars to light her way, both literally and metaphorically. If pressed, she would even find what she was looking for without a reference point. Give her light, and she would trace her steps back to where she’d taken the first. Her mind created maps at speeds Olivier’s head hurt only to think of. They made a funny pair like that, because Olivier would never admit how much mental effort it took her to have a minimum sense of direction and Zinnia would be able to find her home in a blizzard no matter how far away she was from it.

“Does that make you feel any better?” Zinnia asked to cover up her giggles.

The moment had been shattered into little pieces, but the show must go on. So Olivier held her head high, chin up, and nodded.

“Let’s head back, then.”

“Already?”

“It’s dark, you’re not going to see anything. We might as well come back tomorrow.”

“Ah, but there’s a lot to see in the way the streets are drawn, even in the dark.”

“I promise you tomorrow I’ll let you drag me back and forth this town, but tonight let’s just head back. That bed and I were in the middle of a fantastic conversation I would like to resume.”

“Lazyass…” Zinnia muttered under her breath, but she did acquiesce, taking Olivier’s arm as she picked up the pace again. “You could at least make up a decent excuse.”

“Being tired is the best excuse because it’s true.”

“That’s not what you were hinting at. You just want to hump the bed.”

Olivier’s train of thought froze in midair in a way that it was spectacularly evident in her face. _I want to hump you. _It must be evident, yes, because Zinnia said nothing more about it.

“Anyway, it’s not so bad; is it, so far?” she said instead.

Olivier counted her own heartbeats until they stopped hammering against her ears. She hoped she would grow out of this soon, because spending the vacation trying to calm down wasn’t a particularly nice prospect.

“No, the sixteen hours of almost uninterrupted travelling were not that bad.”

Zinnia soft-punched her in retaliation.

“How else do you want us to travel?”

“There’s this new invention,” Olivier said. “A flying ship that covers ground more quickly than trains.”

Zinnia wrinkled her face. “Expensive.”

“I have money, Zinnia,” Olivier reminded her. Even after so long, Zinnia kept forgetting that Olivier’s family was beyond wealthy. When the bonus had come, after the Promised Day and the reestablishment of a proper government, Zinnia had gaped at the numbers while Olivier figured out how to make the most out of it. She’d never wanted money and no war would change that.

“And you would get on one of those flying ships? _You?_”

“Would you quit picking on me already? I’m not as difficult as you paint me out to be.”

For a second Zinnia didn’t know if she’d meant it or it was just banter.

“Okay, then maybe we can try that next time,” she said, trying to sound calm. Whatever had found a way between them was itching beneath her skin. It wasn’t _banter_, for sure. But maybe something alike it. This … teasing. This something which needed to be filled and which they’d abandoned long ago. “Have your parents tried it?”

Olivier smiled at the thought of her mother, regal and uptight, trapped inside a small aircraft for a few hours as the threat of crashing hurled around in her head.

“I doubt it. My father would have recommended it to us already.”

“Your dad was very nice when I talked to him. He said this was a lovely country to visit in the summer, what with all the naval business. He looks open enough to try anything. Maybe we could go somewhere together sometime.”

Olivier’s reply was resolute: “I’m not travelling with my mother.”

During their brief stay at the Armstrong mansion the day before, Gwendolyn had dealt with it by pretending Zinnia didn’t exist. Some things not only didn’t change but also got aggravated with time and there was nothing Olivier could do about it.

“Are you sure you’re not _mad_?”

“I’m not mad, Zinnia. I’m just tired. And talking about my mother doesn’t help.”

And so it was. The rest of the way they were quieter than earlier. Despite herself, Zinnia’s mouth opened a few times before they reached the hotel. Even she couldn’t argue that it had been a long day. Her path-finding skills at their best, no matter if she was sleepy, they were back inside in no time. The hotel clerk was still there, Zinnia greeted her quietly, but Olivier just grumbled a ‘good night’ as if it cost her money.

Then, almost moved by a greater force, Olivier let go of Zinnia’s arm and quickly walked back to the reception counter. She came back with a newspaper in her hands.

When they opened the door to the room again, Zinnia let out all the air she’d been holding little by little with each incomplete exhale. Olivier had sat down on one of the sofa’s, legs over its arm, and started reading the newspaper, but Zinnia had no idea if she should change into her sleepwear, because of their previous conversations. So she just stood there for a couple of seconds until her brain told her body to move somewhere less suspicious. She decided the bed was a good and neutral place to go sit down.

For a few moments, she watched Olivier read. She frowned when she focused very much on something small that normally it would take her less time to figure out. Aside from that, though, Olivier looked relaxed. Tired, but not at all mad. It was a good sign.

Zinnia crossed her legs and leaned forward to see what the headlines were on the newspaper. Olivier had picked up a local newspaper translated into Amestrian. Haling Cove seemed to be _that_ involved with the tourists. Zinnia wondered if they’d have translations into other languages as well.

“What are you even doing, reading that?” she asked casually.

“Catching up with the news.”

That, in Olivier-speak, meant she was combing the pages for a word about Briggs and the war that had just ended. Zinnia had no idea if stuff like that even turned up on papers from other countries, especially if they weren’t involved in the conflict in the first place.

“The war is over,” she said. “What news could there be?”

Without looking up from the pages, Olivier said:

“I don’t trust those men to keep my fort intact in my absence.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time…” Zinnia muttered under her breath. She didn’t say it louder because she knew Olivier didn’t mean what she’d said. She would trust her men with her life, if need be. She was just addicted to the job and it was hard for her to let go, even for a few days.

Instead, Zinnia got up and pulled the newspaper out of Olivier’s hands, much to Olivier’s displeasure.

“You’re on vacation, no reading allowed,” Zinnia said.

“And how do you expect me to pass the time, then? We’re in the middle of nowhere.” For Olivier, the middle of nowhere was, as it turned out, a prolific town and not, contrary to popular belief, the actual wasteland she lived in.

Zinnia grinned widely, tossing the newspaper onto a table.

“If you make me say it, then we’re not doing it.”

Her voice sounded more tentative than she’d meant it, which was a good deal, but still eager enough, terribly eager. What had happened earlier was a pitstop in the way, yet a necessary one. They needed to pave the way back to each other after four years of snows and warfare.

Olivier sank deeper into the sofa and struggled to keep eye contact. The intentions behind that statement should have been very clear, especially after tonight. All she heard, regardless, was the exemplification of banter that led nowhere. Because Zinnia just couldn’t be serious, could she?, and in the end nothing was going to happen. They were just words. Words about thing that Olivier hadn’t done in so long she truly wondered if she still remembered how to do them.

“I’m gonna wear you out,” she said, because banter required more banter. And the night would be long without thoughts to mull over when Zinnia was already happily asleep on the other side of the bed.

Standing right above her, Zinnia bent forward towards Olivier’s head.

“Not if I wear you out _first._”

“You’re absurdly simplistic about this,” Olivier muttered, eyes lost already in the texture and shade of Zinnia’s lips. “Remember I’ve inherited a disproportionate amount of strength and stamina.”

“I still last longer than you in bed, Armstrong.”

“Don’t you fucking tease me,” Olivier whispered slowly, pulling Zinnia right onto her lap, as if the space was wide and ample and not the crumpled up square foot of a sofa.

Teasing was, Zinnia felt, too big a word. This was just … dancing around each other, soaked to their bones and into the soul, hoping to get water droplets on the other. Olivier had once been a practiced dancer of sorts, knowledgeable in the art of it as well as in that of sword-fighting—a different kind of dancing altogether—and Zinnia had had enough experience to move along, at least, occasionally surprising her. Once. Things had cooled down since those days, now the road needed to be paved again. And the fact that they could just pour a sea of tarmac on the dirt right this very second, leaving the arduous task of evening it out to someone else, hammered almost as hard as Zinnia’s heart.

They weren’t teenagers anymore, driven by urges typical of those ages. They were neither old lovers nor enthusiastic youths willing to try anything out. Olivier had _lines _in her face and Zinnia already had too many gray hairs to count. Life had worn them out just the right amount, but they now no longer had the wish to act like fools in love. Then why, Zinnia wondered, were they exactly in this predicament?

A predicament of breaths braiding themselves into a bigger thing, something not quite made of just air. Of limbs intertwined and gazes that burned bright and hot. If anyone had had a say in naming this unspoken thing between them, they would have used the word ‘passionate’, and Zinnia would have gotten angry. Passion in itself had died long ago; something else had taken its place, akin to the binds of loyalty and yet sillier, sweeter, even longer-lasting.

“Do you feel _teased_?” Zinnia asked.

“_Are _you teasing me? Because if you are … I’m not entirely sure I don’t like it,” Olivier admitted with a smirk, passing her tongue over her lower lip in a slow motion that tugged at Zinnia’s heartstrings, although mostly just her lungs, like fingers coax notes out of a harp.

And then Zinnia realized one thing. This was, after all, a dance, a dance where no one led and four feet struck the floor. A dance of no tradition yet bound to the laws of the eldest one.

If she wanted to dance it out, the road would still remain a dirt-covered path. At least a few nights longer. Sure-footed, she left Olivier’s lap with a coy smile and got into bed as if nothing had happened, as if nothing _was _happening.

Olivier had forgotten, in her quick decision to like teasing, that it involved tugs of war that postponed the inevitable. No matter how inevitable it was, Zinnia had just made a statement about when it would _not _happen. And Olivier, legs crossed on her sofa again, smiled to herself. She had been crowned victor of two wars, what would another one bring forth, one fought in a harbor town for the taste of her girlfriend? 

* * *

Zinnia didn’t need to open her eyes to know the daylight had filtered into the room, bathing it in yellows and whites, soothing its perennial color warmness for a moment. As soon as her dreams faded into new memories, she felt it. How can the air be different in another part of the world, when the oxygen is the same all around? She smelled novelty and possibility in the dust floating among the sunlight and she craved it.

With a muffled sigh, she turned her back on the sun—and Olivier, sleeping soundly for once, despite the hour—, a huddled ball of a human that hadn’t seen anything but the north in years. The north, whose springs lasted longer each time, although never for too long, never long enough for all of the flowers to bloom, all of the snow to melt. The mountains of the Briggs Range always were always topped by white. This town, on the contrary, was covered in blues and reds and greens, not just the eternal grays and browns of rock and dirt. And the sea… it awaited, somewhere, hidden by buildings and ships. A sea greater and vaster than the lagoon back in Amestris Olivier had shown her during one of the summer incursions into Drachma.

Zinnia opened her eyes to the reality of that sea, the jewel of Chalybes, being mere yards away, somewhere in the horizon. The windows were open and more than sunlight came in. The breeze brought the sounds of carts and horses, a market in the distance, and the tide, unstoppable and powerful, lulling the rest of it into a melody no other town could repeat.

She wondered, stretching in the bed of the hotel, what made this town _special. _And she ached to see it. So much of her was Briggs and Olivier and a life that had chosen her, but the part of Zinnia that marveled at the unknown still kept beating, almost like a second heart, pumping excitement and interest all through her.

She turned again, this time facing Olivier’s soft expression as she slept, and her heart—her real heart—shivered in anticipation of something old, something unspoken, something that incited emotions too complex to be rendered entirely in a few words. The world was indeed a treasure to appreciate and cherish and learn from, but nothing compared to waking up to a face and knowing you will be allowed to watch it wrinkle.

And Zinnia knew by now she would get to see the long-promised wrinkles and everything that came before that. She had signed up for it all and, perhaps selfishly, she wished it could come sooner. Because living the soldier life wasn’t a good guarantee for reaching old age, and Olivier had a tendency towards self-sacrificing.

Her eyes fluttered open in slow motion, like the wings of a hummingbird, and a smile came upon her lips quite easily, as if she had forgotten for a moment who she was and what her name required of her. Sometimes, if Olivier slept well into the day, she would definitely forget. But it never lasted long. Before the split second was over and Zinnia’s heart had begun weaving words to describe how it felt to witness it, Olivier’s face was once again a mask—thinner and less practiced, but still present.

“Don’t tell me you were watching me sleep.”

Zinnia pushed back her hair, recently cut back to the length it had been years ago, and laughed.

“Normal people don’t do that,” Olivier said.

“At this point in life there’s no way you and I are normal. I mean, just try to come up with one thing about us that is.”

Olivier seemed pensive for a moment. Zinnia felt a pang of curiosity about what hid beneath those thoughts, looking for remnants of a normalcy that wasn’t there. There was nothing particular that set them apart from the rest of the world, but they weren’t ordinary either.

“Love.” Olivier cleared her throat. “We love like everybody else.”

Zinnia managed to keep a straight face for a split second, then promptly fell forward onto the bed, wrecked by laughter, and onto Olivier, who tried to push her away to no avail.

“Get off me, you’re heavy,” she complained. “Why’d you have to do this? You’re not a child…”

“Love, she says. _Love. _I swear to god, someday the world is going to find out how much of a _mush _you are and you’ll get a new nickname. Something like The Queen of Terrible Pick-Up Lines.”

“I am not _mushy_.”

Finally, Zinnia picked herself up and sat more or less straight, leaning dangerously close to Olivier again, swaying like a wooden swing in the wind.

“Oh, but you _are_,” she said. “Or you would have said something else.”

“I didn’t _think_ of something else.”

Despite Olivier making decent efforts at sitting on the mattress as well, defending a territory that belonged to them both, Zinnia managed to come close again, lying through her teeth about the innocence behind it.

“Trust me, I don’t _love _you like everybody else.”

Nobody really did experience the same love, not even the same person twice. So there had to be some truth to Zinnia’s words, but Olivier was getting something much stronger from them than a simple statement, a rebuttal to her own contribution.

Casually, Olivier pitched in again.

“I don’t love you like everybody else either.” She snorted. “Clearly. Do you think I’d be here—”

“—in the middle of nowhere—” Zinnia completed, mocking her with feigned emphasis, hand to her heart and throwing back her head.

“—if I didn’t love you in a way that nobody else can love?”

She hadn’t meant it to sound harsh, but perhaps it had, because Zinnia’s playful expression faded as she looked down at her hands, limp now over her crossed legs.

“Does that mean it’s not love all the same?” Olivier went on. “Does that mean my love is less valid, less human? We may not be normal,” She paused, “but we do love like normal people. And that may not mean a lot to you, but it does to me. Normalcy gets lost after twenty years in the border, you’ll find out one day.”

Zinnia gulped audibly and looked away. She didn’t know what to say about it. She’d wanted to think of their love story as something grand, something that no one else in the known universe could ever be lucky enough to have, and yet what Olivier took away from it was that it made her like everybody else, instead of setting her apart like her height, her strength, her name, her job.

“For instance, I have very little love for sight-seeing,” Olivier continued, also unable to maintain eye contact, “but enough love for you to put up with it if that means I get to wake up to your face a few mornings in a row where we have nowhere to be … and the world to see.”

That did make Zinnia smile, and somewhere between the birth of that smile and the last curvature of her lips, they both looked at each other. In a way, getting here from Briggs had been a display of love from the both of them.

“Ready, then?” Zinnia said. “There’s gotta be a few square miles of town we can analyze to painstaking detail today.”

Olivier didn’t look away now.

“As soon as we have breakfast and you get some food in you,” she said. “You didn’t eat at all last night.”

There were things Zinnia would have eaten until the sunrise, but none truly edible, and all she was better skilled at in her head, in those memories of different times when she didn’t have to carefully plan them. Perhaps today, with a bit of tuna and bread and enough closeness, it would be time. Or maybe the planets still had miles to go before they truly aligned.

She nodded.

“Then up you go, because I’m hungry.”

And however much Olivier enjoyed taking her time when getting out of bed, it mattered very little now when she had that thin mouth pouting in affection towards her. They got dressed together, and for once Olivier was the first to finish, as if this was a race to see who managed to look presentable in less time. Today, her prize for winning was watching Zinnia, indecisive between a sleeveless white dress—a flower pattern of blues and soft pinks on it—and an outfit similar to Olivier’s—a sleeveless cloudy white shirt and beige shorts up to a few inches above the knee. Carefully feeling each in her arms, Zinnia leaned after to put them back over the suitcase and admire them back-to-back, the curvature of her ass and thighs a sumptuous bait for Olivier’s morning appetite.

“It’s hot,” she just said, arms crossed as she waited on the sofa. “Just pick the dress.”

“But if I wear the outfit, we’ll match!”

“This isn’t a romance novel. Who cares?”

“It’s cute!”

“It’s useless. We already match when we’re wearing our uniforms and I don’t see you getting excited about it.”

“And so do we with the rest of the fort. Just humor me for a second.”

Olivier held her gaze.

“Dress,” she insisted.

Zinnia rolled her eyes.

“Okay, fine. But only because it’s late already and I want to get going.”

Olivier didn’t say that she knew that wasn’t why. She waited as patiently as she could and watched, not without some frustration, how Zinnia put a light jacket on to leave the house before she grabbed her purse.

“What? It’s breezy out,” Zinnia said when she noticed Olivier’s ever so expressive face about it.

“Nothing,” Olivier lied, holding the door open for her.

It took them a while to find the room where breakfast was served and they found it pleasantly crowded with a few other guests that had risen late. They were led to a luminous table, a window opened at its side, and served a rich meal. For a few seconds, they sat in awkwardness, listening to the conversations of the others, until Zinnia took note of the paintings hung evenly across the walls of the room.

“Oh, look, it’s a ship.” She pointed at the one above their table. A blue and white vessel was at the center of the painting, the contrast of sea and sky made evident by the shape of the ship in the middle of both, their horizon of sorts. A few low waves broke on the lower surface of the ship, their foamy droplets splashing against the painted wood. “Such exquisite attention to detail…” Zinnia muttered to herself.

Olivier, halfway through her tuna toast, glanced up at it and spoke, her mouth still full:

“You’d figure hotels would know better and be more original with their decoration.”

“They gotta sell the whole town, not just their services,” Zinnia said, shrugging.

Olivier swallowed and left the toast back on her plate.

“So, where to first?”

“First I need a map or a brochure, anything that tells me all there’s to see.” She had read up a little about the town, but only the basics, and mostly just about accommodations. There were always hidden treasures in towns that no book could pinpoint and Zinnia had made it her secret mission to find them all.

“And after? You want to see the harbor?”

Zinnia nodded enthusiastically. “And the sea. Just promise me the sea, okay? The rest we can talk about later_._”

Olivier looked at her, torn between sudden pity and denial. How could she not know already that Olivier would promise her _anything _Zinnia wanted that was in her hand? Even if it blistered her feet. And in these shoes—typically masculine, made just for her as a birthday gift from Alex last spring—definitely would in this weather and after all the walking that Zinnia’s eyes shone with anticipation to get to.

They left not much later, their bellies full and content. And, as it turned out, the day was sunny and equally breezy. When the breeze blew through them, it brought a faint smell of salt and sand, even in the heart of the city, far enough away from the ocean. The paved streets seemed much narrower in the daylight, when people and horses buzzed past them, carrying produce or tourists, and it was _loud, _differently loud.

Olivier knew well that the decibels at Briggs were enough to make a newbie uncomfortable sometimes, what with the engines and her boisterous soldiers rendering them almost quiet with their chitchat. After so long, it had ceased to bother her. But she knew to recognize it as what it was. And this open space that sprung sound out of anything with a surface surprised her in its different loudness.

She and Zinnia made their way back and forth, guided by Zinnia’s incessant need to find a point of reference and those maps she so craved. Even if she was well capable to find her way without them, maps grounded her, gave her a sense of linearity she didn’t have otherwise. That was why Olivier had appointed her to take care of the mapping done during the war, because nobody else would be as efficient and quick as she was.

Upon finding a tiny bookshop with a fish jumping over the double ‘o’ and the ‘k’ in its title, Zinnia all but ran inside it, followed grudgingly by Olivier, who was grateful for the cool shade it provided. They exited it ten minutes later, with Zinnia carrying brochures and Olivier carrying a few maps of the area and country that Zinnia had no literal space in her hands and purse to anymore.

Southwest to the Selenic Ocean, the couple headed straight for the harbor. Of all the things they could have seen that the brochures advertised—a local church, the parks, the many shops—, it could not have been any other place, because it was something that they didn’t have in Amestris. They spotted it after some time, having crossed the town in the closest thing to a straight line. It was at the literal end of the country, giving way to miles and miles of beaches at either side of it. Zinnia and Olivier saw it all from the distance, the dozens of ships parked in the water, and the people both in and outside the harbor, selling and buying, boarding ships into the ocean.

Zinnia’s heart gave a fluttery jump in her chest. This was the end of her world. A little more and there was only sea for many miles. And beyond it lay Novorbem, the new world, discovered after their continent and slightly less populated. All she had right in front of her smelled of novelty and opportunity. This was what she had been missing, all those years of self-confinement within the circled nation of Amestris.

Upon walking closer, the feeling grew more solid within her.

“It’s… beautiful,” she mumbled at some point, already half-immersed in the world of the harbor, of the comings and goings of fishermen and merchants.

Olivier looked at her, then at what she was enamored with, and wrinkled her nose. It smelled like day-old fish and sweat. The ships piled up in the water, some rusty and barely big enough to carry back sufficient seafood, some luxurious and not at all destined for fishing. A few ships further away, in the right side of the harbor, the passenger ships, with more windows and huge platforms on the decks. And sailing towards the horizon, yachts, their sails open and pristine when the sun hit them properly, white as few very things in life could be. Crowded as it was, Olivier wondered how something like this could be seen as beautiful. The limited space constricted her breathing, there was so little room that wasn’t taken up by something or someone.

No matter in which direction they moved, people crushed them. People that smelled like the depths of the sea and sweat from spending too many hours working under the sun. But Zinnia never ceased to look around her as if she had found paradise, even if only the smallest fraction of the sea before her was free of ships.

It freed Olivier from the constraints of being in public as she was, in company of her girlfriend of many years and not at all dressing like she was supposed to. Yet it still made her feel inadequate, after so many years of uniforms and a childhood of oppressive rules.

They walked the entire length of the harbor, back and forth, and the second time around, closer to lunch, the wooden platforms seemed to be a little less cluttered by men. Olivier, hands in her pockets, made good use of the situation to approach the yachts on the far left end of the harbor.

“Why ships?” Zinnia asked.

“I’m just browsing.”

Zinnia took a good look at the yacht in front of them. A placid-looking ship painted in whites and blues, the colors of the Armstrong mansion, that seemed unoccupied at the time. She figured it belonged to some rich family that could afford having it parked—did boats get parked?—until a whim arose to travel the Selenic Ocean. And speaking of rich families… that gave her an idea. “You’re thinking of buying or something?”

Olivier neither nodded nor shook her head.

“I’ve never seen ships in person before,” she only said calmly.

Ships for one’s own purpose in life. If she had one, the ship would sail wherever she headed to, and it would serve as protection as well as transportation. It provided a way to travel that Amestrian people didn’t know about and that many would simply adore. She didn’t doubt for one second that her parents would definitely buy one if they had means to make it sail on an Amestrian river.

“They seem to carry even more power than any vehicle I know.”

Zinnia chuckled. “Even tanks?”

“Tanks don’t count as vehicles. They’re just efficient ways to aim a gun at the enemy. Like cannons with actually operative wheels.”

“Do ships incorporate guns?”

“I’m sure they could.”

“And to think we could’ve easily defeated Drachma using ships, invading their land from the west?”

Olivier turned around slowly as if the mere motion of it hurt her and blinked at Zinnia with all the feigned patience in the world.

“Are you telling me this has just occurred to you?”

Zinnia nodded, not catching up.

“_Four years after_?” Olivier enunciated slowly.

“… You would have done that?” Zinnia’s eyes opened wide.

“Of course I would have done that! If it meant winning faster than we’ve won.”

“The Briggs Armada,” Zinnia said, carefully tasting the expression in her mouth. "Sounds dignified.”

For a second, they shared the same mental image, that of the mighty Briggs soldiers getting on tiny ships after many hours of crammed train travel. Would they endure well the narrow spaces of a ship, on the way to war? Would they manage to not want to kill each other for the whole duration of the trip? No matter how hard she tried not to imagine it, though, Olivier’s mind gave her the picture of loud Buccaneer, standing tall and proud on deck, true for once to his last name. He would have loved the ocean.

“Anyway,” Olivier said, turning towards the ship again, arms crossed behind her back. “We should head back, find somewhere to eat.”

“Yeah, sure, the royal stomach is getting hungry, eh?”

Olivier rolled her eyes because she knew it was just normal teasing and no normal answer would be given if she spoke her mind. Because, clearly, more than just her stomach was hungry these days. Hungry and tentative, a terrible combination.

So on they went, walking the length of the promenade by the sea, with Olivier occasionally realizing she’d left Zinnia behind, leaning on the banister as she longingly watched the sea move in the distance. Finally, after a few times of that, they landed themselves in a tiny place without a bar that had a giant menu glued to the glass windows, advertising the ‘best anchovies’ of all Chalybes.

Olivier and Zinnia had shared one single look and had had to just go in and try them. The anchovies were served a few minutes later, with the two of them squeezed in a table by the corner, and they came on crunchy bread with soft crumb.

The waiter, a plump short bald man with a pencil behind his ear, assured them that the anchovies were the star dish in all of the Chalybese coast and that they would find no place that offered tastier ones.

Stifling a laugh, Olivier and Zinnia had grabbed their respective half loaves of bread with anchovies on top and toasted with them. Zinnia’s face was a full spectrum of emotion after swallowing her first bite.

“These…” she said, her eyes open wide, “might as well be the _best_ thing I’ve ever eaten.”

Olivier shrugged. “They’re not bad.”

“Your taste buds should have gone on strike years ago. Please tell me they still work.”

“I’m more of a meat girl.”

“Girl…” Zinnia giggled. “You’re not a _girl._”

“What am I?”

_A mountain, _Zinnia thought to herself, biting down hard on her lip. Years and years and Olivier would always be a mountain to climb. Sometimes up, sometimes down, but Zinnia needed to always have her in sight, to plan an expedition or two, perhaps an extended stay on the side of the mountain.

“Already a woman. Tall and strong and very scary.”

“I’m more of a meat woman, then,” Olivier repeated.

“That’s better.”

But the giggles continued. Only ever muffled a few seconds after when Zinnia started fanning her face with her hand.

“It’s hot, isn’t it? I’m not used to the heat.”

Olivier gestured vaguely to her no-sleeve situation. If there was anyone in the world that did not tolerate well the heat, that was Olivier Armstrong, but Zinnia sure knew how to be dramatic.

Casually, Zinnia got rid of the light jacket she’d donned in case of a breeze, and contorted her body in order to hang it from the back of the chair. Olivier couldn’t help it, her eyes fixed on Zinnia’s shoulders as easily as they once did on enemy lines in the distance. This, though, was much much closer—and perhaps a tad more dangerous, even. Despite her having lived through her early years of adulthood, Zinnia still retained some softness often associated with adolescence, especially to those shoulders, perfectly round underneath the fabric.

Olivier had to pinch her thigh in order to stop daydreaming about a thing as insipid as shoulders. She had never liked shoulders, it wasn’t one of those features of the body of a person she was attracted to that made her stomach dive towards her feet while butterflies exploded out of it up into her heart. This was just the lack of sleep and the strange food, perhaps even the trip itself, still made evident in the stiffness in her body and the unfamiliar scent of everything. Even her clothes had smelled of something other than home this morning when she had put them on.

“That color suits you,” Olivier said dryly, as if she was commenting on the economy pages of a newspaper.

Zinnia looked down at her belly.

“Hm? White?” she said, taken by surprise. “I prefer yellow, actually. Less bland.”

“The flowers make it look less bland,” Olivier said.

And they did, indeed, although to be true, Olivier was not paying attention to them. She just wanted to hand out a compliment, the kind of compliment that married couples exchanged in the sunlight after a long day spent together, and the dress had been the first thing to come to mind. The things she really wanted to say would sound ridiculous in public, where anyone could gossip in.

“It’s not my best dress,” Zinnia said, clearly dismissing it, as she took another giant bite of her anchovies.

And, to Olivier, all of her dresses were her best dress. She only had to be wearing it for it to suddenly become a hidden treasure, barely even noticeable in an atmosphere that tried to outshine her. But she said nothing about that now.

After a few seconds, Zinnia gazed into her eyes and smiled, shifting the focus of the conversation.

“You look pretty good yourself, too,” she said. Different and yet the same Olivier that walked proud, blue on her back and chest, knowing what that color meant to the world. This Olivier was slightly freer, a little more distanced from work than _at _work. And it would still take a little coaxing to gently pull at her to leave her shell, but Zinnia was ready for it. “Shirts make your shoulders pop.”

Olivier had the good decency not to blush, since she was clearly thinking of shoulders too—and what was _not _shoulders but lay right in reach of them.

“They’re too wide for shirts.”

“Well, they’re the strongest shoulders in all of Amestris,” Zinnia joked. “Whoever says they’re too anything deserves to be knocked out by the arms that are joined to them.”

“If you’re trying to get me to give you the last piece of this,” Olivier said, keeping a straight face. “You should know I’m not.”

“I thought you’d said it was just ‘not bad’.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t want to eat the last of it.”

“Plus, you started with the compliments. What do you expect me to do if you compliment me? A thank you?”

_A kiss, _Olivier’s eyes said, without need for Zinnia to even look into them. Her body language, too, asked for more than a thank you and more than a kiss. And it was just so attractive to witness her control herself so effortlessly in appearance. Zinnia thought this had gone on long enough, this game that no one won and this rekindling that neither knew how to do. They were like schoolgirls, recently caught up with the truth about their sexualities and the feelings that they shared for one another. And nothing was as dangerous and appealing as a once ferocious lover turned soft and insecure like a shivering sheep. Zinnia just could not think of Olivier as a sheep when she’d always been the big bad wolf, at least until Zinnia had fully jumped into the fray and showed her that even wolves can be tame, that even wolves fitted better sometimes as the submissive part.

Now, Zinnia had to try very hard not to give voice at the worlds hiding beneath that little word: submissive.

“What?” she said. “Don’t have an answer ready, smartass?”

“I do. It’s just not fit for your ears.”

Zinnia guffawed.

And it felt good to see her laugh like that, despite everything. Despite the tension that had worked itself between them. It didn’t exactly put a damper on things or hurt them in any way, but Olivier was burning with desire to punch it until it broke and turned to ash.

At least after a while it seemed to subside enough for them to return to a more touristic state, leaving the little restaurant very content and adequately full. Almost without meaning to, they ended up walking on the promenade again, and this time Zinnia went all out. She dragged Olivier into a million different shops for the remainder of the afternoon.

First came the bookshops, now not on the quest for maps but for reading material. Upon asking her why, frowning and a little tired, Olivier received an answer she wasn’t expecting.

“I want to know what they read here,” Zinnia said. “It says a lot about a person, the books they read, the stories they consume...”

And so it did, Olivier knew because she would be perfectly described by her reading habits: paperwork and the paper. Only last night, she had clung to the written pages of the press as if they had the solution to her problems. Although, if Zinnia had a say in all of this, she would surely say sarcastically that being on vacation away from the fort didn’t actually constitute a problem.

So Zinnia wandered free from place to place, holding ancient stories in her hands, always knowing when to move on to the next, never actually buying anything until she came across a special edition of one of her favorite books.

She was so bouncy, holding it against her chest as if she had found the world’s greatest treasure, that when she looked at the price and totally deflated Olivier felt something go out inside her. She very nonchalantly took it from Zinnia’s hands and slammed it in front of the shop’s owner.

“Olivier,” Zinnia tried to tell her off. “It’s _too much_ money.”

It was adorable, how she lowered her voice, how she tried in vain to get Olivier to behave like a normal human being. Olivier couldn’t let this pass her by. She had never bought Zinnia a thing, aside from food. Not in four years, not even during those months they had stayed at Central, waiting out an inevitable war. The satisfaction of paying for this, one tiny little book with velvety blue overs and beautiful golden letters, could have lasted her weeks.

“Olivier!” Zinnia said again.

But Olivier brought it back from the owner’s hands and gave it to her.

“Now can we go?”

“Did you just do it so we could leave?”

“No,” Olivier said. And Zinnia _knew _she wasn’t lying, although she still couldn’t help but roll her eyes at her anyway.

And even if the book-craze was over—Olivier’s heart melted, not in the heat but at the sight of Zinnia loving that book so publicly—Olivier was not off the hook. After came a more interesting part of the afternoon, with the two of them getting inside every single shop that advertised swimsuits.

“You’re never going to use them again,” Olivier said as Zinnia avidly observed all the swimsuits she laid eyes on. The colors were dull and boring, but the shapes she had never seen before. Most covered a decent amount of skin, even if the limbs would be left bare, but some did risk public decency and had no sleeves or pants to speak of. Zinnia did like those most.

“This is a one and only chance of swimming in the sea, Olivier. Amestris is land-locked.”

“There’s always lakes and rivers… Not so … soup-like as the ocean,” Olivier muttered under her breath. Despite her initial aversion towards water, she had to admit some of these swimsuits would look ravishing on Zinnia. She should bite her tongue for a little bit at least, until Zinnia actually bought one and tried it on. At that thought, Olivier had to bite her tongue more than just a little bit.

Zinnia ignored her remark, showing her a few models she had picked from the shop.

“Which do you like best?”

“You’d look good in blue.”

Zinnia rolled her eyes again.

“I meant for _you. _Pick one.”

“I’m not buying one.”

“Oh, yes, you are. You’re swimming with me. This is non-negotiable. When are you going to see the ocean again?”

“We can always come back.”

“Come on,” Zinnia said, pouting a little. “We shouldn’t postpone it.”

“You can swim if you want to, I’m just not going to. I’m an Ice Queen, not a water pirate.”

Zinnia laughed. “This might just be the most hilarious thing you have ever said. I should write it down.”

Olivier sighed. “Okay, fine, walk me through it.”

And slowly Zinnia showed her all available designs. Of course, Olivier being the contrary to modest, she picked one of those that were slightly more controversial, a beautiful model of soft yellows.

“We’re not trying them on?”

“Where?” Zinnia said, laughing. “Because I am not undressing myself here in front of god and everybody.”

There was a woman sitting in the corner of the shop, placidly reading a magazine.

Olivier shrugged. “Not a lot of people here.”

Zinnia punched her affectionately in the shoulder and went to pay. Her face when walking out into the sun once again was priceless. Olivier could tell she was really imagining the scene, the two of them going into the endless ocean. Despite not being afraid of water, Olivier would make a show out of it, if only to make Zinnia laugh. It did something to her stomach, having Zinnia laugh at something she’d said or done. It was like getting fireworks lit inside her. And they went upwards in all directions. It was the kind of thing she felt everywhere, but had to confine to one single organ in fear of blushing inelegantly.

“Now, what?” Olivier asked. The sun was no longer as high up in the sky as hours before, and if it wasn’t starting to decline already, it soon would. It cast an enormous shadow on her.

Zinnia looked at it for a moment and pointed at something she’d spotted behind Olivier.

“There. It’s the town’s castle.”

“There’s a castle?”

“Uh-huh,” Zinnia said, eyes lost in the side of the mountain. “D’you think we can climb up there in time?”

“There’s still a couple of hours of light…” Olivier said, hinting at a ‘but’ at the end of that sentence.

“But we should leave this—“ ‘This’, meaning the heavy book and the bags of swimsuits. “—at the hotel.”

Olivier looked up at the sky too, already orange at the corners, and shook her head.

“It’s not that heavy, I’ll carry it.” It was a promise, for her. A commitment that she hadn’t ever considered making tangible, as in a piece of paper that she would never—_could _never—sign as long as her heart was the heart of a soldier. But it was there, regardless, in the small things. Olivier would carry a bag of swimsuits and a heavy book to the peak of a mountain so Zinnia could see a castle under the light of the sunset. She would climb that mountain, her feet hurt all that they may. Some things were worth doing, worth not even fretting about at all.

She went in to try and get the items out of Zinnia’s hands, but Zinnia didn’t make it easy for her.

“Why’d you wanna carry it? I can carry it.”

“I’m stronger than you,” Olivier said softly.

“Not for much longer,” Zinnia crooned. For longer than four years, this had been a joke between them, since Zinnia had entrusted Olivier with her life-long fantasy of being stronger than her, beating her in a fight. No matter how hard Zinnia trained, Olivier was always superior strength-wise. After all, it was genetic, there was not much she could do.

“What is that even supposed to mean?”

“After we go up there, you’ll no longer be as strong. You’ll be … _tired _and … sweaty from the weight.”

Olivier arched an eyebrow. “Of a book?”

“Yes,” Zinnia defied her.

“Gimme that,” Olivier grumbled, finally taking Zinnia’s stuff. “Which way is the castle?”

“Any way is _the_ way when you travel with me.”

And of course it was. Whether they were on the right street or not, Zinnia always found the next corner they had to turn or the path in the mountain that went up, always up, and not east towards the valley. Once they had managed to ascend a few feet, they had the privilege of witnessing the view from above of the town, drenched in oranges and yellows, still full of activity, although the sounds of it didn’t reach them as fully anymore.

Then, to either side of it, the beaches spread, solitary. And north of the town and its seaside, a range of round mountains that merged onto the darkening horizon, each greener and grayer than the last.

It was, all things considered, a beautiful climb. Amestris, in its diversity of ecosystems, had very few spots that could compare to this small but wonderful town. It had been built between two contradictory environments and acted very well as the equilibrium that kept them apart. Olivier couldn’t stop turning her head towards the sunset and the town. Time after time, she lost herself in the colors, in the smell of salty breeze and the scorch beneath her boots. And no matter how right Zinnia had been about her getting tired, she couldn’t stop walking, aware that further up awaited the castle, with even better sights of the whole bay west of the town.

The sweat had already coated her forehead, plastering her blonde hair against it, and made it hard to hold onto the bags and the book, but Olivier persevered in silence, breathing heavily by now. A few steps further awaited what she and Zinnia had walked so far for.

It was a small castle built on gray stone, with a tower and a wall. It even had a touristic sign dug onto the grounds around it, notifying Zinnia that visiting hours were well over.

She walked back to where Olivier waited, a defeated look about her. It would have been beautiful to see it and thus be exposed to how people lived, long enough ago, in a country so different from Amestris.

“It’s closed,” she told Olivier.

“No wonder, it’s late enough.”

“We could come back tomorrow to see it. Do you want to find out what treasures and fancy carpets are waiting inside it?”

“Not really…” Olivier said, her back turned to her, face facing the sun.

“It said on the sign that it belonged to the Haling family before the government bought it after they’d all died out.”

Olivier laughed to herself.

“What came first, then? The castle or the town’s name?”

“Probably the castle?” Zinnia said, facing the sun as well, covering her eyes with her hand. “I mean, if it’s called Haling Castle because of the family that owned it… it makes more sense than to name a castle after the town where it’s built.”

“Yeah…”

And Zinnia didn’t push it, because then Olivier turned her back on the sunset, the beautiful spectacle of light that occurred naturally every day, and sighed at the mountains, already dark enough that it was hard to make out their shapes.

Olivier missed home, Zinnia knew this well. She had left Briggs fully aware that for Olivier nothing else compared, nothing else would make her feel as connected to a place, a people. And, this one time, she had left Briggs safe, after a victory in war. There was no reason why anything had to go wrong.

But the last time Olivier had gone away, Amestris had been close to destruction. Zinnia imagined that the memories, the flashes of those old days, were hitting Olivier pretty hard right now.

Sometimes Zinnia got them too. Flashbacks. Sounds so mighty that she had to cover her ears, images so rapid that they burned her eyelids. And the smell. Always the smell of blood and gunpowder. Mixed with the taste of her own tears.

She hardly ever allowed herself to dwell over the many bodies, with faces that she’d known and loved, strewn over the streets of Central City. She knew for a fact, though, that Olivier did think about them often. Especially about one. One dead man and the soldier that had remained where that man had been buried, forever guarding his tomb and his country, because he would no longer be able to.

But they both knew that was the past. They had recovered well, after such an experience. Although Zinnia suspected some nights, when she couldn’t sleep and Olivier was pretending that she could, that they had simply poured all of their effort and time onto a new war, the northern war, before they’d had time to properly heal.

She slowly slid her hand onto Olivier’s and Olivier exhaled.

“I’m sure everyone’s fine,” Zinnia muttered. Then, she remembered the temperament of the Briggs men and what they liked to do when left to their own devices and smiled. “I bet they’re drinking all of the beer before you’re back.”

“I don’t drink when I’m working.”

“No, but when you do you can outdrink them all. They’re scared of the supplies running out.”

“So? New supplies get ordered. I don’t see how it’s a problem.”

Still, Olivier’s eyes and heart were somewhere else, far enough away that it was hard for Zinnia to comprehend how the both of them could fit inside the same body. It was almost wholly dark around them now, the colors too shaded by the night to be able to see them, and yet Olivier didn’t seem like she wanted to leave.

There was still a hint of light on their backs, in the very horizon that faded into both sky and sea, but neither Zinnia nor Olivier were aware of it. All they were aware of was the infinity of dark blue the tons of stone and dirt hidden in the mist of it.

“You need to get your head out of the game for a while,” Zinnia said softly, not letting go of Olivier’s hand. “Rest a little from supplies and numbers and men. It’s healthy.”

“I will,” Olivier said, not looking at her yet. “When you stop babying me.”

Zinnia sighed with all the patience in the world. Living with Olivier Armstrong required a fully equipped arsenal of patience.

“If I don’t baby you from time to time, one of these days we’ll find you working nonstop for three days and someone will have to literally carry you to bed, despite you fighting them in front of everyone. I’d rather save us both the embarrassment.”

Olivier said nothing now, her hair drifting with the breeze, getting a bit colder with the darkness.

Zinnia tried a different strategy.

“I know you miss them,” she said. “I know you feel guilty for taking off. But you need it. _I _need it. It’s been a hard four years, Olivier. And you’ve worked through them without weekends off like the rest of the men. You even fought first-line against the Drachman armies.” Zinnia chuckled lifelessly. How quick she was to let through all of the feelings she had kept repressed and forgotten during the war for the sake of Olivier. None of the past years had been kind on her feelings, with one thing leading to another and a full-scale conflict springing out on her from the minute she had set foot in Briggs again. And she had known, oh yes she had… But that hadn’t made any of it easier to bear. “You fucking led the negotiations, crossing the border on _foot. _Anything could have happened to you, and thank god it didn’t, but it still could have. That’s an emotional toll we both need to heal from.”

Now it was Olivier’s turn to sigh, melancholy.

“Maybe you’re right.”

“You know I am. It’s not the first time we have this conversation.” Zinnia smiled playfully. “Why else do you think we’re here? You gave Zinnia an opening and Zinnia made _very_ good use of that.”

Olivier smiled faintly too. It had taken Zinnia mere hours to find the perfect place to go, Armstrong-approved, where the single thought of war and Drachma would be impossible to think. “That, you did. Always have.”

Zinnia linked her arm with Olivier’s.

“Then, shall we go have dinner somewhere dirty with loud music?”

Olivier beamed. Just how she liked it. 

* * *

The next morning dawned as heavily sunny as the last. Even with the windows open, there was a stagnant amount of heat in their room that woke Olivier and Zinnia up. One shared look and Olivier knew, much to her slight displeasure, that today they would just have to pack their swimsuits with them. Because she was sure that if they postponed it any longer, Zinnia would just grow a mermaid tail and leave her for the marvels of the ocean without a second thought.

Before leaving the room, they made sure to pack their bags with everything they could need while on the beach. Sunhats, an extra bundle of underwear for after the swim itself, towels to get dry and sit on, and a large parasol.

It was like one of those adventures that only happened in books. No danger up ahead, just the excitement of whatever the road has in store for you. The soundtrack to it, if there had been any, would have been lively and upbeat. Like Zinnia’s mood today.

If she was already bright and warm like the sun, today she gave off thrice the amount of light and warmth on the way out of the hotel. The pair of them looked positively like tourists—and, which was worse, like careless tourists. Not bothering to dress like the locals nor like the aristocracy in the hotel, carrying an insane amount of beach items, and still managing to look happier than any of the astonished people who watched as Olivier opened the door with her foot for Zinnia.

The walk to the beach was no less interesting, to be completely truthful. But the gazes they seemed to attract were a different kind, less hostile, more curious and glad than judgmental. After all, the town did live, however minimally, from tourists who liked to eat large and enjoy the amenities of the place.

They didn’t have to walk for very long, though, and they didn’t take the route they had the day before. By now, Zinnia already knew the layout of the town like the back of her own hand, and since they had already seen the promenade, this morning she opted for a more secluded path. She took Olivier to the river, on the outside of the town, the harbor a distant memory on their rights. The lights of the day shone blue and white on the water, murmuring on its way until it met the sea, only a few yards away from Olivier and Zinnia.

The bridge they had to cross in order to get to the beach was significantly older than anything else around them, a remnant of the foundation of the town, perhaps. It was a beautiful sight, to say the least. The river slowly but surely travelling its last feet until the ocean swallowed it as it did all bodies of water that flowed towards it; the town enveloping the western coast of that stream and only a few yards to the east beyond it, with only small shops and houses to shield the sea from the eye of the visitor; and, then, the vastness of endless blue, ebbing, flowing, coming, going, always in motion. There was nothing as glorious and as simple on the planet, and yet Zinnia’s and Olivier’s faces when they glimpsed it again said it all.

The Selenic Ocean, on the northwest of Chalybes, the last peak of the continent that faded into waves and foam. There was nothing else like it. Olivier’s parents had talked about the Xing Sea to them as well, a body of rose water and beaches of dark sand the size of the Desert Area, but this ocean spread miles and miles off to the coasts of Novorbem, on the other continent, and it bathed the coasts of Drachma, up north, where it ate up the Obolian territories. The Selenic Ocean was something that Amestris lacked, something forbidden and enticing that now was just within Zinnia’s and Olivier’s reach.

Just there, coming onto the shore and flowing back in an endless dance.

They followed the river until it met the sea, merging with its slightly darker waters until it disappeared completely into it. Somewhere to the right, there was the soothing melody of a song in soft Chalybese and the buzzing sounds of the small crowds that gave life to the beach that morning. But that belonged to the town’s heart, where all activity was, this beach in front of them was quieter, without music or crowds, just the occasional cry of a seagull and the scarce tourist sitting in the sand, facing the ocean.

After a few yards, the music downtown was hardly audible, just a tiny murmur, like a heart beating tenderly. Zinnia all but threw herself at the sand, butt-first, when Olivier gave her the green light to make of this spot something theirs and theirs only for the day.

“What the hell?” Olivier said, erupting into laughter as free as the winds sweeping up small grains of sand from the surface of the dunes.

“Will you think unkindly of me if I just roll around and get sand all over me?”

“You can do anything you like, sweetheart.”

Zinnia made a grimace but did lie down on the sand, long as she was, and looked at the soft teal of the sky. If she hadn’t been so perfectly aware of the texture of the sand beneath her, the smell of salt and something faintly cooking in the distance in the air, and this sight of immensity before her, Zinnia would have thought herself dreaming.

She spread her arms, wanting to feel everything in the skin on them, too, as Olivier stood and squinted at the horizon like she had never seen one before. They were such a contradiction, those two. Zinnia rolling around literally in this new place and Olivier tentatively observing it before she formed a full opinion on it.

“This is … so different from _everything_,” Zinnia said after a minute or two. “Like, have you ever felt this anywhere else? This … peace.”

And Olivier smiled, because the answer to that was so simple. Her paradise retreat was the place Zinnia wanted her to escape these days. The mountains enclosing around her, the smell of ale and beer and red meat, the loudness of the men that were only subordinates during work hours, and the height of that wall she defended with her life.

“It is different,” she said. “It’s…”

She had no words to describe it, but Zinnia did.

“Like being a kid. I haven’t been this excited about everything since…” And Olivier looked at her, filling the answer to that in her mind. _Since you and I. _And it had been years. Years together, fighting wars, their backs touching in the night, never getting complacent with seeing each other wake up in the morning.

For a second there, this vacation was a slice of another life, what could have been if Olivier wasn’t a general, if Zinnia hadn’t given up on a normal life for her because she liked hers best.

Then, without any warning, Zinnia jumped to her feet, kicked her sandals off, and sprinted towards the ocean. Olivier almost had no time to react, she just had to _run _after her, holding on to both their things for dear life as she did. She almost broke into laughter because of the serendipity of it all and stopped short of bumping into Zinnia, who was barefoot, sandals in her hand, feeling the breeze of the sea in her face.

The sand had gotten between her toes, dry and then wet, when she dipped her feet into the waves. She stared at the shape of her feet in the water, almost a different color under the blueness of it.

“Aren’t you going in?” Olivier asked her.

“Only if you come in with me.”

“Absolutely not,” Olivier said. “I’ll watch you. Someone has to stay here and watch our things.”

Zinnia almost laughed at the sight of Olivier trying not to drop anything onto the sand a second too soon. She looked like an octopus, neatly dressed, but with six arms less than it should.

“Your loss.”

“Maybe some other day…” Olivier muttered. She and the ocean… they would have to dance around each other for some time until she trusted it.

She headed back with Zinnia to their spot and set everything up, the sunshade and the towels, and their bags safely tucked in near the pole of the sunshade so Olivier wouldn’t worry about them getting stolen.

And that was when Zinnia started taking her clothes off without any warning, as if there weren’t people—few, but definitely _people_—on that beach.

“You can’t do this here!”

Zinnia, very much naked underneath her dress, stuck her tongue out at Olivier. “Watch me, love.”

“Oh god…” Olivier muttered under her breath. “Just _use _a towel.”

Pulling on the swimsuit she’d bought the other day over her groin, Zinnia replied:

“Nope. It’s taking me longer to fight you than it will to just put it on.”

And when Zinnia passed her dress over her head and remained like that, topless and almost perfect in her sand-covered legs and back, Olivier thought it was a pretty good moment to die. It was one thing to have access to the sight of Zinnia’s bare chest in the privacy of their own home or hotel room, but to fully receive it in this very bright light in the middle of a beach… Olivier didn’t know what to do with herself or where to look.

Then Zinnia threw the dress at her. Olivier had no clue about how she had managed to catch it before it reached her head, but she was glad, it had kept her from avidly but shamefully watching as Zinnia finally finished putting on her swimwear.

“All done!” she announced.

This second race towards the sea was much more interesting to witness now. There was pure simple childlike joy in Zinnia’s steps, running and skipping, and then finally throwing herself at the water as if it would be able to catch her. She squealed from how cold it was and Olivier smiled, exhaling amusedly, as Zinnia gave no fucks about coldness and buried herself underwater for the sake of it. She swam around, splashed seawater all around her, and screamed from sheer bliss, like a toddler on their first bath.

It was the most beautiful thing in the world, more worthy of being preserved in a postcard than the landscape without her in it. And it lasted long, but it didn’t feel like it. Zinnia fought the sea and danced with the sea, jumping and diving, chasing her own reflection on the waves and trying to stop them with her body. The sun was high on the sky by the time Olivier yelled, amused:

“Don’t you get tired, flower girl?”

“If I were a flower girl—” Zinnia replied, still moving around like a storm. “—I would’ve already drowned in all this water!”

“Don’t tempt luck and get out, I’m getting lonely.”

“Go get lunch,” Zinnia said. “And maybe I will keep you company for a while.”

Olivier smirked. “Should I get dinner too?”

“Go wild!”

So Olivier fetched lunch: sandwiches from one of the stalls in the suburbs and drinking water. Zinnia would get so thirsty after all that exercise she was doing, and Olivier would be her merchant with saddlebags full of water.

When she got back to the beach and returned to her spot in the shade, Zinnia was still giggling to herself in the ocean, but she did stay true to her word and came out of the kingdom of fish and mermaids to join Olivier for lunch. Zinnia talked and talked between bites, about things that only she could see, perceptive and curious beyond measure, and Olivier listened, because it was like witnessing a painter pass their brush for the first time over what in the future would turn into a masterpiece. She got flashes of a world Zinnia experienced and Olivier never would, and it was all that she could have dreamed would come out of this crazy vacation.

Zinnia returned to the water not much later, eager to live it all again, better and brighter. Olivier sat back on her towel, putting the sunhat on, and watching other people swim far away, barely dots of brown against the blue of the ocean. This just had to be the most peaceful spot in all of Haling Cove, quiet but not silent, and natural like the interior of the town couldn’t be.

She spent the next few hours watching Zinnia again. She knew Zinnia had brought books and that she wouldn’t hold it against her if she picked one and started reading to pass the time, but she preferred to see her like this, unabridged and free. Who knew how many more chances of it she would get in the future? Olivier was forty, bound to the fate of Fort Briggs, and this was a situation that wouldn’t likely repeat itself. Eventually, Drachma would grow vengeful again, under new leaders who didn’t remember first-hand the dangers of war against Briggs. And Olivier would have to be there to meet them in battle once again. No more vacations, no more days off, no more indulging. War and hardship was what she had signed up for, all those years ago. So if she could enjoy it once, just once, that would be today. Because Zinnia deserved it, if they were to spend the rest of their lives awaiting attacks from an intermittent enemy.

A long afternoon ensued, but the evening brought calmness. Slowly, the beach emptied almost completely when the sun began to decline, and it was just Zinnia in the water and Olivier under her sunshade. The sounds that came from the town lessened in intensity until they were almost inaudible. There was only the lolling of the sea against the sand and the wind in their ears.

It was then that Zinnia emerged once again from the water to fetch a drink, her throat parched and her muscles throbbing softly from the day’s exertions. She was going to ache all over in the morning, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. But after a quick drink and a smile at Olivier, dripping Zinnia went back to the waves, where a part of her might belong. She had scattered herself over areas of Amestris, looking for somewhere to let her heart take roots, and when she had found the perfect spot she had ceased giving herself to every other place she saw. Perhaps this was the first time she had found a worthy place for the part of her that might have lived in a town by the sea, if things were different. It should have scared Olivier that she loved someone that for many years had not had a home, but after so long the only thing she wanted out of their relationship was the peace Zinnia gave her.

Right now, though, Zinnia remained close to the shore, leaning forward to wash her hands up to her wrist in the saltwater. The swimsuit clung to her like a second skin, wet and wrinkly, and shone almost as her skin did under the fading sunlight. For a moment, Olivier was tempted to take off her hat and clothes and go join her, maybe even grab her and run with her to the depths of the sea where they could both swim away for a while and be together. Alone in the sea, something that up until a few days ago they would have never dreamed of having.

Instead, Olivier sat tight, hands on her thighs, and tried to still her breathing, slightly heavier than before at the sight of Zinnia like that. Now, she wasn’t only thinking of swimming away for the sake of it. Other things would happen, too, if she ran to meet her. Things under the waves, hidden in their darkness now that the sun didn’t hit them directly. Things that made her loins tense and untense like ropes on a ship. She bit her lip and tried to think of something else, but there Zinnia was, unmoving, washing her hands by the shore over and over in a cycle that never ended. And Olivier had to close her eyes, but even so. _Something _had settled within her, asking for release, and she was tired of caging her feelings.

If she moved her hand just a little to the left—just a little, just a little—, she could work at releasing it slowly, discreetly. Nobody would even see, they had all gone, and Zinnia would soon wade back into the ocean, oblivious to everything that wasn’t the surface of the water. Why not do it? Why not do it and end this? Olivier didn’t want to be a slave of her feelings anymore than she wanted to cage them, and this would be a fairly nice middle ground. She moved her hand, at last, and over pants and underwear alike she tried to see if it could work, after all. Her hand was warm and the space between her legs was warmer, but … this was not the place nor the time. It wasn’t her own hand she wanted there, was it? Not for a few days, at least, it hadn’t been. During the war she’d made do with it, learned again the art of self-sex, yet now there was no war. Only a beautiful woman in a swimsuit right in front of her.

Olivier moved her hand away to readjust her hat. Her sigh was long and full of those things she couldn’t really give voice to unless someone heard her. Thankfully, the sun didn’t take long to decline on the sky, hiding itself between the peaks of the mountains on Olivier’s back, and with it her aching, her feelings, and her worry melted away as the torrid heat of the day did too.

Olivier took down the sunshade, its flaps moving in the wind, when Zinnia came out of the water, now for the final time. She had a smile on her face and her body that couldn’t be described with any words Olivier knew. It was the expression of a woman truly at ease and it made Olivier’s heart rest calmly in her chest.

“You’ve earned a place in heaven,” Zinnia told her, sitting right next to her on the towel.

“For sitting on a beach?”

“Sitting on a beach _all day_,” Zinnia corrected. “Getting lunch…”

“We could make a dinner out of the scraps,” Olivier said, wrapping Zinnia up in a dry towel and holding her. Now, with the sun drifting away so slowly, the heat had turned into chilly breezes coming and going.

Zinnia leaned her head on Olivier’s shoulder as she held her.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

They ate afterwards, not moving away from each other, their eyes watching the sky change as the sun fully set behind them. Olivier lost herself in the colors—the oranges and pinks and purples—that took over the never-ending blue that for most of the day had reigned supreme. Being able to observe it as it evolved into a kaleidoscope of clouds and new colors, it felt like a privilege, far more worthy than wealth. The waves came and went as ever, but their pace was slower, gentler. Perhaps they, too, had grown as placid and tired as Zinnia, who was tucked in Olivier’s arm like there was no other place in the world where she belonged. It was all so … peaceful. The war had been over for some months now, but this was the closest Olivier had ever felt to peace. Her fort was safe, prepared, and well-provided, and she was here with the woman she loved, in a deserted beach, under the sky and above the warm sand. And in that moment, not even Briggs could compare.

Night had fallen around them by the time they had decided, amidst whispers and giggles, to pick everything up and retire for today. Zinnia didn’t even get dressed, she just crumpled her dress into a bundle and put it in her bag as Olivier carried most of the heavy stuff. Guided by the lights of the town, now almost completely silent, they headed back to the hotel.

“You should try it, Olivier,” Zinnia was saying. Her fingers were wrinkled from all the time she had spent in the winter and Olivier had pointed it out, laughing softly. “It feels really good to wrinkle with something that isn’t age.”

“You’re not as old as to wrinkle already. Neither am I for that matter.”

“Come on,” Zinnia nagged, supporting most of her weight on Olivier’s side. “Just one quick swim. Just let me get you all wet.”

Olivier side-smiled at that word and kept walking.

“I just don’t feel like it. I will walk into any snowstorm there is, but not dive into the ocean.”

Zinnia bit her lip.

“What _if_ … the range melted?” Her hand kept going back to Olivier’s arm, lingering over it. In other circumstances, it would have meant nothing, but tonight it reminded Olivier of the physicality they had lost with age. “What if you had to swim?”

“When the north melts…” Olivier said, stopping for a second to leave a kiss on the crown of Zinnia’s head. “… I’ll melt with it.”

Those were the rules of the ice queen that ruled over the frost. When that frost thawed, what would she be queen of?

“I’m serious, Olivier.” Zinnia giggled. “Just one time. With me. I’ll even lie to the men and tell them you absolutely refused, stubborn as a mule.”

Olivier gently unfurled Zinnia from around herself and got her hands in her pockets, looking at the path they were walking on back to the town.

“I don’t want you to lie for me.”

“Okay, then we can tell them the truth. But… please. It’ll be just this once, we can just never ever get near water again and I promise I will behave about it.”

Olivier sighed, getting her hair away from her face. “After what I’ve seen today, you expect me to believe that?”

Zinnia didn’t seem to know what to say. She stayed behind for a few steps until she did.

“I’d make the sacrifice for you.”

And Olivier turned around at once. Zinnia had already made the sacrifice. Coming north, after Central… Olivier had never understood, had never hoped to understand why she would do that. But she had learned since Ianthe had asked to do the same and she hadn’t let her. Some choices weren’t hers to make.

“I’d make _any _sacrifice for you,” Zinnia added.

And then she came close. And without words she spoke the truth that Olivier tried not to listen to too often. That this trip was all about her, even if she had made it about Zinnia. That none of this was about what it seemed. And that she had the immediate future in her hands.

With words, she spoke another truth.

“And non-sacrifices, too. Choices, compromises. I’m in for the whole of it. So, if you don’t wanna swim, no one’s swimming.”

“We’re not even talking about swimming, are we? Because one of these days I _will_ swim with you, will say farewell to my crown and become a queen of ice in water…”

“I don’t even know anymore what we’re talking about,” Zinnia admitted. Because, no, of course they were not talking just about swimming, not from the second Olivier had asked. Not from the second _she _had straddled her on the train, thinking that after four years there would be no consequences to that. “I just know that … it’s been a while, and things are different.” Her hands on Olivier’s shoulders, her feet arched. Her words different than what they’d both thought they would be. “But that doesn’t have to mean we can’t adapt to them.”

Her head leaning forward, her eyes closed.

Olivier still had her hands in her pockets and had no clue where to put them. Her brain did, but her body had frozen in place.

“I saw you. Earlier,” Zinnia said. And Olivier knew exactly what ‘earlier’ meant in this context. “And we’ve waited long enough. Unless you want to wait any longer.” She opened her eyes wide, as if she had just been struck with realization. “Or … y’know, forever. That’s cool too.”

And how could Olivier voice her fears? Fear that she had forgotten how. Fear that something had been lost to wars and work. Fear that age had mellowed her. Fear, in general, that Zinnia would never want to do this again. Fears that logically made no sense, until she stopped thinking about them as somebody else’s fears.

“No more waiting,” Olivier finally agreed, in a mutter, as she wrapped her arms around Zinnia. It was meant to be a gesture that melted the ice between them, but Zinnia took it literally. Because it had been four long years for her, too. She kissed Olivier less anxiously than their first time, all that time ago. No one was running away, no one was staying behind. They were at the beach, half a world away from home, and nothing else mattered except getting back something they had lost. She kissed Olivier like two girls might kiss each other on their first time, but also like they had been lovers for a lifetime, used to each other’s bodies, used to expectations and surprises. She kissed Olivier like she had loved her for far longer than just six years.

“You’re all wet” Olivier said to Zinnia, after. Whatever dampness had remained on Zinnia’s swimsuit had just been transferred to the front of Olivier’s sleeveless blouse.

“I would be very displeased to find out you’re not…” Zinnia teased, speaking about a different kind of wetness. “…underneath all that unnecessary clothing.”

Olivier felt a shiver in her body and frowned.

“No public nudity…”

Zinnia burst into laughter.

“Said the woman who first had sex with me in a room anyone could have walked into.”

Olivier blushed a little at the memory. That had been only the beginning, and it had been such a rocky beginning. The words they had said, how they had behaved, locking themselves onto that room and kissing until their lips hadn’t been able to take any more.

“No one saw us,” Olivier noted. And it made all the difference that no one had. Things would have escalated quickly otherwise, and it had been close. Very close. But, luckily, they had been able to keep it a secret for a little longer.

Zinnia wrapped her arms around Olivier’s shoulders and kissed her again, lightly on the lips. Something was beginning to build, amidst memory and present, a coiling of their old passion. Love had kept them afloat all these years, love and commitment, but they had missed the passion. And especially today, after these last few days in Haling Cove, they knew they could finally stop missing it to start reliving it.

“Not the point, general.”

“Call me ‘general’ one more time…” Olivier breathed out, a whisper like the breeze, but a promise of intensity, if Zinnia chose to accept it. And Zinnia neared Olivier’s face, muttering to her ear a very clearly enunciated word.

“General…” she said. “General Armstrong. Will you come to the hotel with me?”

Olivier grinned. “You wanna get out of here, huh?”

“If it means being with you somewhere less public where we can do less public things, then yes.”

And so Zinnia had made her choice.

On the way to the hotel, they kissed beneath every streetlight, black shadows on the gray sidewalk, their bodies bigger and longer on the painting that was the road beneath their feet. They almost waltzed from streetlight to streetlight, hands and waists as the dancers, never leaving each other’s eyes. It seemed for a moment that the streetlights were getting closer and closer, less spread out on the empty streets of Haling Cove; a gift made just for their embrace.

The miles melted into inches before they noticed, lips wet and hearts close to racing, a few beats away from becoming runaway horses on a prairie. The sounds that surrounded them were the sounds of the night, of affection turned carnality, and of love too old to be forgotten. Even when trying to contain them within themselves, worried about the other guests in their perfectly quiet rooms hearing them, they overrode their footsteps, the slow and hard scratching of the key against its hole before Olivier slammed the door open, her hands rough against the wall until she found the light to switch on.

Zinnia stood at the now closed door, breathing heavily, and looking at her in puzzlement. “Why’d you turn it on?”

Olivier answered wordlessly first, her body commanding enough for the rest of her. The general had come out to play, after all. Tactical, strategical, cold as ice, royal, and emotional where only one personal in the world could see. She approached Zinnia, towering over her, and moved the dark strands of hair away from her eyes, bright and expectant.

“I wanna see you,” Olivier said, like it was the simplest thing in the world and the only valid motivator she could have for this. Didn’t lovemaking tend to usually be portrayed as a quiet, dramatic thing to do only in the dark of the night, in the comfort of a bed and four walls to keep rain and gossipmonger away? And hadn’t they broken all of those rules time and time again in earlier years? Even if her body had forgotten all of those things—the touches, the scents, the power—Olivier’s mind remembered it with pristine clarity. And she wanted to live it again in the full light of a lamp if the sun wasn’t available.

Zinnia let Olivier wrap her arms around her waist, slowly establishing a dominance that Olivier hardly demonstrated outside of the battlefield.

“You already know me by heart,” Zinnia said, laughing a little. “Or have you forgotten all of me so soon?”

Four years… There was not an ounce of ‘so soon’ in it. But Olivier would have remembered all her life, if she must. Some things the mind engraved forever.

“Memories just aren’t the same, you know?”

But, regardless, Olivier turned off the light.

“Thank you,” Zinnia muttered sweetly.

And the sounds came alive, once again, their breathing louder and wilder than before as they waited in the closest thing to silence they were capable of. Zinnia’s mouth dried in the wait, but she was patient—must be patient. So she waited, her willpower taking over as she kept herself from begging Olivier to pull her closer _now_.

Every second of it was sweet torture, until the minutes piled up and Olivier’s breath in her lungs, in her soul, in her heart, was enough to send Zinnia spiraling. Even so, she behaved, for all those times she had made Olivier behave. Her hand was barely a murmur over Olivier’s blouse, toying slightly with the white little buttons, when she asked:

“So… Is this my punishment?”

“What? No,” Olivier said. Her entire body seemed close to full vibration. She, too, had firmly stood her ground, closing her eyes and inhaling Zinnia’s scent—saltier and more intense than normal after the long hours in the sun and water. All she could think of was all those times, with their clothes half-on because of the cold weather on Briggs, and the exquisiteness of the open air on the Armstrong mansion’s gardens the day Mustang had interrupted them. He had caught them early, before Zinnia’s mouth had travelled south between Olivier’s legs.

She clenched her groin at the memory.

“I just…” she said, voice rougher than usual. “I was wondering where to start.”

“That’s easy,” Zinnia replied. “You start with a kiss.”

And when it came, it wasn’t like all the other kisses, given to each other where people could see and judge. It was not even like those streetlight kisses, promises about a ‘later’ that now was a ‘present’. This was the prologue of a long book, thick and warm in their hands—a road trip to enjoy.

Olivier closed her eyes and let her body remember. Her lips moved slowly, tentative for the first few beats of her heart, then secure on Zinnia’s, who came and went like the tide. And every time they returned, Olivier tilted her face downward, as if wanting to drink the entire ocean at once.

“And then…?” she asked, fully aware of the answer.

This wasn’t about knowledge. This was about setting the stage, then owning it. Oh, it had been so long since she had, how could she be sure her performance would still work now? What if it was outdated? What if it wasn’t enough anymore?

“Then…” Zinnia said, her hands still on Olivier’s buttons. Her fingers trembled slightly against Olivier’s chest. She could feel them, like the heart of a hummingbird, soft and warm, only a thin fabric away from her skin. Finally, Zinnia undid the first button, a few inches below Olivier’s clavicle. “… our clothes come off.”

Zinnia narrated, taking the lead, and Olivier let her take her wherever she wanted. Because there was no narrator like her, and Olivier knew this very well. She still kept proof of that in her office, every single word of it.

“_All_ of our clothes?” she asked.

“Mmm-hmmm…”

The window was open and there the breeze entered the fray, all the way from the sea. For the first time, it would be like being outdoors, but secluded in a safe place where the rest of the hotel slept. Olivier could feel the breeze seeping into her like lotion, thick and chilly.

“That sounds like a plan, then?” she whispered.

“A very good plan.” Hands like rose petals, Zinnia had. The pads of her fingers brushed against Olivier’s sternum as they traveled down from button to button. “If you’re interested.”

And if this was a board game, Olivier had sat down to play a long time ago. “_Very _interested.”

It was her blouse that came off first, baring her chest to the breeze coming in from the open window. A little ray of orange light came in, too, almost coy in illuminating her breasts, round and slightly sagging just a few inches away from Zinnia’s hands on her waist.

“And why would that be?” Zinnia asked playfully. She was so small, she only had to lean forward a little to tease Olivier with her breath right on the center of her chest, warmer than almost anything else in the room.

They both knew full well why Olivier was interested and slightly trembling in Zinnia’s arms. The snow, the war, the men… Things had kept them apart, under the same roof but never in the same way as it had been in the beginning, when Olivier had run out of desperation. Perhaps this, too, had a little tint of desperation to it. A little hint of that feeling of something other than breath coming soon to rest and hover over the skin of her nipples until they hardened underneath the only touch they had ever belonged to.

It soon came to pass, sooner than Olivier was anticipating, and Zinnia did not stop there, sly and quick to pull down Olivier’s pants. She kicked them away as Zinnia placed a hand on her upper thigh—so near yet so far, there but not quite there just yet. And her body suddenly _remembered _vividly many, many things she had tried to keep quivering and meek beneath her skin. The sight of Zinnia in the light of dusk, dripping water out of every edge and curve of her body, glistening like a second smaller sun in the surface of the water. Even the wrinkles on her swimsuit had dared Olivier to close her eyes and open her legs to her own hand, then. She spread them open now, inviting, almost begging.

“Have I ever told you,” Zinnia muttered hoarsely, so very very close to the beating of her heart, “how lucky I feel that I’m the only one that gets to see you like this?”

Olivier couldn’t repress a chuckle. “Like what?”

But Zinnia’s answer, as lately all had come, did so without need for words. The hand on Olivier’s thigh finally moved upwards, a little to the left, and reached Olivier’s pubis.

“Fuck…” Olivier mumbled.

“Vulnerable,” Zinnia said. And her word was an action. A motion. That of her fingers, deft and able, almost low enough to touch sensitive skin. Almost, and there for a heartbeat, then back up again. Like a Ferris wheel. “Iceless.”

And she was really the one person in the world who could ever call an Ice Queen that. The only one, the very source for the heat that had turned an Ice Queen into an Iron Queen, even though old titles were hard to shake off.

Zinnia had melted the ice, Zinnia would melt the iron. The gold of her crown, the thickness of the furs around her neck. And Olivier would be queen no more. In her arms, under her mercy, Olivier was nothing but a woman.

“True.” And Zinnia’s last word was a catalyst for the ending of four long years. Her fingers pushed past thick dark blond hair, and its soundtrack was that of Olivier’s head resting against the wall as her eyes closed and her teeth fixated on her lower lip in order to keep quiet. “Ready, Armstrong?”

“Been ready for four years…”

Four years and they ended thus. In a quaint hotel room across the world, with the sea lightly beating the grains of sand on Chalybese shore. And nothing had changed, not really. Age had made them become slightly different people in their jobs, but in the heart of their lives they remained two women who desperately loved each other.

Zinnia was very gentle at first, as if touching the most delicate thing in the world. She moved slowly on Olivier, eliciting small wet sounds from her. It wasn’t hardly strong enough a touch for that, but it had been … indeed a long time, and the skin didn’t remember half as well as the rest of the body did. Everything felt like an explosion of sensation.

As seconds passed, Zinnia picked up the pace, slightly increasing the pressure, and Olivier was unable to muffle any of her gasps any longer. If the whole hotel heard, so be it. If they were to be asked out of the premises, she would not look back. She would do anything to have this just a minute longer. Just the smell of Zinnia, so close, so very close, and so _alive. _Quiet as she was, her presence took up twice as much space as usual. And it was exquisite. To see someone normally so small and mild take the reins like this.

_Like what? _Olivier had asked. Like it had always been. Like it should be.

She loved a leader. Not a commander, not a ruler. A leader. Zinnia took her places. Here, to Haling Cove. Here, to this room, as it could have been underneath the starlight and the artificial suns out on the street. And Olivier would follow anywhere. Here, across the Selenic Ocean, out into countries whose tongues she didn’t speak, whose people she wouldn’t like. All because of a woman.

If Drachma had known this was her weakness, the war would not have been won. Her pride would have suffered, her reputation vanquished by the enemy. But it would not have mattered, if she’d been able to stay with Zinnia.

And now, finally, Zinnia’s mouth stopped teasing, following the footsteps of her hand, and began sucking gently at Olivier’s exposed nipple. And the sound Olivier made at that made her own loins shake.

“Come here,” Olivier grumbled, like a mountain before the avalanche. She pulled Zinnia’s head up to kiss her long and hard. Olivier drank her in, the tastiest flavor in the universe. Only then, welcomed in and encased, did Olivier _move. _

Her hand was chaste in lifting Zinnia’s skirt, still damp from the beach, and tugged at her underwear until her fingers were inside it. Zinnia was much, much more vocal than Olivier was.

“You’re not … playing fair. Now we’re both distracted. It’s gonna take longer.”

Olivier kissed her again, starving. Now, two could play this game. If she had waited long for this, long it should last, to make up for it.

“Was that a complaint, Erwin?”

None of it was a complain. They’d missed each other, like crazy, like old lovers and like new. Touch had been missing, sex had been missing. Getting it back… it felt—

“You know I love you, right?” Zinnia said, eyes closed. Her hand had never stopped moving on Olivier out of a miracle, because she was no longer aware of anything but the two of them, here and now. It was all slow, then racing like a heart, then fell into a rhythm that always picked itself back up. Two hands, two women.

—it felt like going back in time.

To the first room that had seen them together.

To the first room that had seen them undress together.

“And _I_ love _you_. Always.”

It felt like nothing had ever been gone from them, just absent for a while. Like everything could start again. Like maybe fears weren’t as strong as they had deceived them to be. It felt right. And it felt good.

Getting _this_ back out in the open was enough to make Olivier almost cry, enough to make Zinnia forget this corniness could never make it underneath the sunlight. It was enough to make them realize at times nothing really mattered. Until some things did, and some things always would. This. This, always this. Until the end of time, until the oceans ran dry, until the sky turned into ash. Until the last snows covered Briggs.

Two hands, two women. Then, eventually, … all of a sudden, sought for, coveted, and cherished: two orgasms.

Two backs hit the unmade covers of the bed, two breaths escaped them. Two smiles came to be, soft and beautiful, on two sweaty faces.

Two words, Olivier would have added. If they lived a different life. If they had a cozy home somewhere in the west, herding cattle and growing corn, instead of a military fort in the heart of the north. If Olivier believed in those words. She wanted to say them, because of what they would mean to Zinnia, not because of the action they would require of her. Olivier would never say them out loud, but that night on that bed, tucking a stray lock of brown hair behind Zinnia’s ears, she wondered about them. About what could have been, if she wasn’t Olivier Armstrong, Lieutenant General of the Amestrian Military.

_Marry me… _she thought time and time again. _Marry me_ _in a church whose architecture you will always like more than religion. Marry me in a field of the greenest grass and the finest flowers where we remember our fallen friends. Marry me by the sea, your feet covered in sand and saltwater, mine forever committed to the shore until that day. Marry me, because I love you like no one else can ever love again. Marry me because I want to be yours until I fall—and I will fall._

And she knew Zinnia would have said yes to a piece of paper that bound them together in law and truth. But that was the ending of a story that wasn’t theirs. Not then, not like this. Their story went on, like the ocean, like land stretches out for miles and miles until the blue skies eat every inch of it.

Olivier fell asleep that night thinking of prairies and flowers, cows and corn, a church of old, and a white dress that would match a black tuxedo. She fell asleep, naked, in the hands of the woman she loved. And for a moment, everything was still within her. Then she dreamed of the ocean. Dark hues of blue and black, continuous movement that could kill, and a distance that was dangerous to sail. Except that some ships were courageous enough to brave it anyway.

When she awoke, her heart already knew how this story had to end. 

* * *

“Where are you even going?” Zinnia had to speak a little louder. Olivier had run off a few steps forward, looking for something that Zinnia couldn’t see, and the crowds mucking about the wooden planks of the harbor didn’t make communication any easier.

“Conducting some important business,” Olivier’s voice came, obviously enjoying the mystery that had surrounded her since she had gotten up this morning. She had this … look on her, like she had decided about something important and didn’t want to share it just yet. “That enough for you, Erwin?”

“You only call me that when you’ve a reason to,” Zinnia complained, but still followed, pushing past the people. Here, she was a tourist, more than anywhere else, merchants weren’t going to just let her through.

She heard Olivier laughing. “Just come on.”

And she did, wondering just what the hell had happened in that organized little head to decide to come back here, to the smell of fish, the loud discussion of prices in the background, and the groaning of the ships against water and wood. She hadn’t gotten the impression that Olivier _liked_ this very much. She’d looked far more at ease at the beach, and that was saying something.

Finally, the crowds cleared, all pooling towards the market at the harbor and the circulation of produce from ship to shore. This was the leisure zone, where ships of important people waited to be sailed to sea. They were magnificent vessels, far more appealing to the eye than the fishing boats, built to travel the ocean comfortably, without getting wet.

Zinnia was panting a little when Olivier finally stopped in front of one of the smallest ships. A man was just jumping from it onto the harbor, sweaty after a few hours of work underneath the sun, and he stared at Olivier, frowning.

He spoke in the dialect of the province with an impatient grunt.

“Only _Amestrian,_” Olivier only replied. She had no patience for these things.

So Zinnia butted in with a quick: “Sorry.”

“I said,” the man emphasized. “What’d you want?”

“Big beauty you’ve got there,” Olivier said, looking up at the sails. They’d been rigged in, but she could still imagine how wide they would look when set free. “How much is it?”

The man stared at her.

“It’s not for sale, lady.”

“Wait, you want to _buy _this?” Zinnia interrupted. “After all that ‘no, I’m not buying a boat’ talk and you’re … buying a boat, after all??”

“It’s a ship, lassie,” the man corrected, but neither were listening.

“What would you do with it?” Zinnia pressed on, ignoring him. “Amestris is—”

Olivier rolled her eyes. “Landlocked.” She sighed. She had hoped to keep this revelation of hers from Zinnia a bit longer, to build up the surprise. But, now that she thought about it, it was as good a time as any. “I guess I’ll have to buy a house here, too. We could come every summer, once the last of the snow has melted. The men could handle things without me for a few days, you said so yourself.”

Zinnia raised an eyebrow. The question she was thinking didn’t even need to be voiced. _But _could_ you handle it, Armstrong?_

“Look,” the man said again. “’S not for sale. And your lassie here doesn’t want to buy it anyway.”

“That’s between us two,” Olivier said, glaring. “Just name your price. I can assure you I will meet it.”

He regarded her quietly for a few moments. At first glance, Olivier wasn’t just any rich lady. Her clothes pointed in a totally different direction, towards someone with enough money to dress well that still chose to appear deviant. Normally, people didn’t _have _to make anything of it. But this man wanted to know if she was speaking truth. Every detail mattered to him. Zinnia imagined that her standing right next to Olivier in a summer dress and sandals, her hair a mess in the wind, wasn’t helping much.

“She’s the heiress to the Armstrong family,” Zinnia said, shielding her face against the sun coming in from behind the mast of the ship. “We can meet _any_ price.”

It was strange to say those words when the two of them spent so much time pretending it was a different life for different people. After Olivier had beaten her brother into losing the position of family heir, the aftermath of the war hadn’t really required her to drop it in his favor. She had been sole heir, and Philip had seen kindly to it, after her service to the winning side. She had returned to the family, however actively she could, given her new position up north. Zinnia thought that those days spent in Central had, in a way, made her closer to her family, because later on Olivier hadn’t cast aside the heirship nor the fortune that came with being an Armstrong. This potential buy right now proved that.

“Alright,” the man finally said.

And there was no negotiation, Olivier really spared no expense. She wanted a ship and now she had it. As to who would sail it, the seller had assured her that one or two people could handle it without much of a problem. Zinnia got the feeling that he just wanted his money and to take off without a second thought, but she said nothing. Neither she nor Olivier knew how to sail a ship, whether ‘sailing’ was put into simple or more complex terms—at least that she knew of.

When Olivier told her to help her get it ready for the sea, Zinnia froze at the immediacy of it.

“What about the _hotel room_?”

“It’ll wait for us. We already paid for a few days more,” Olivier said. “Besides, there is no way you could refuse a stroll in the ocean, is there?”

And Zinnia had to agree with that. The sea tempted her greatly, all that mass of ever-changing blue, right beneath her, all around her. It would be a greater sensation than that of swimming in its immensity. To sail it would be a privilege.

Olivier put both arms around Zinnia’s waist and exhaled deeply.

“Novorbem awaits,” she said very, very softly. “Somewhere behind the line of that horizon, a new country awaits. A new continent.”

“Technically,” Zinnia pointed out. “Coming here was also a _new_ experience. And there was no ocean-crossing involved.”

“You’d be the first in your family to leave the continent,” Olivier whispered to her ear. She knew what she was doing, of course. She was tempting the curiosity that permanently lived within Zinnia. That curiosity that had emerged as something else at the sight of the Selenic Ocean licking the shores of Chalybes. “Let me take you to sea, miss Erwin.”

And, of course, Zinnia needed to hear no more. She got on the ship, hair flying in all directions, wherever the wind commanded. Olivier always used her surname sparingly. And now she was using it to lure her to her final offer, something unexpected and wonderful. Something so _contrary _to their lives that Zinnia had never stopped to even dream of it.

Olivier was offering her more than just the materiality of a ship and house by the sea. She was putting forward the idea of yearly vacations here, away from work and duty. She was offering a glimpse into a life without soldiers and wars, a life that could be theirs for a few days every summer.

And Zinnia loved that life as much as she had fought for her real one. She loved it, the same way she loved books about dragons and mermaids, about castles inhabited by rich kings and queens, about centuries in the future where humankind ruled over sky and space. Because it all enhanced the life she actually had.

Together, they maneuvered the ship into actual sailing. It turned out, two people _were _capable of doing it, even without knowing much about ships. Just a nuance here and there about ropes and sails and there they went, cruising away from the noises of the harbor into the peace of the ocean.

The lights of the sky, blue and orange and pink with the occasionally white and gray from the clouds, reflected on the broken surface of the water. What surrounded them was a picture come alive, something that had been breathed life into. Every inch of the world before them looked like it had been brought from somewhere static, to then reach its full potential here. The taste of salt in the breath of the wind, the rustle of the seafoam against the hull of the ship, the creaking of the mast and the mumble of the sails. All of it seemed to have leapt out a book, where every piece came together beautifully, to stand here in the perfect chaos of the real world. Chaos was life. It was in the randomness of life that one could find spontaneous beauty. A seagull flying overboard, solitary under the changing lights of the fading day, would not have looked as mystical, as enchanting, had the sun been higher up in the sky.

And once they had moved far enough into the ocean, so far that the town was no longer visible behind them, that chaos became also a little spark of danger. Small enough that it would really do no harm, but big enough to have the two of them experience this more deeply. Things can be experienced differently in the calm of a sunny day or the first thunderbolts of an oncoming storm.

After a while, sweaty after long minutes of sailing, they dropped the anchor and sat down on deck, looking at the sunset behind them. Night was coming, and with it the end of another day. Simple as it was, the cycle of life could turn difficult to understand sometimes. All the worst things that had ever happened to humanity, every discovery that had been made, every murder that had led to war, every beautiful hour spent with a loved one, happened within the same twenty-four hours. Everyone had the same allotted time in a day. And the fact that some day time would _end _for them all was often hard to grasp.

But that day Zinnia and Olivier rested on that ship—now theirs—as if none of it mattered. They were at a crossroads, literally. Between home and their vacation. Between the continent and Novorbem. If they pressed forward, eventually they would cross over to what once had been affectionately called ‘the new world’ by explorers from the other side of the planet. If they returned, they might make port before night had fallen completely, welcomed in again by a foreign town and a hotel room bed.

They had survived two wars in a span of four years, standing too in the very heart of a crossroads. Perhaps that was why neither moving forward nor going back made it into their calculations. Sometimes there was a third choice: to stay where one was, to drop anchor.

The ship stopped moving, only ever lulled mildly by the waves, and aside from the life of the ocean, their breaths were the only audible things. Until, of course, Olivier stood up, tall as she was, and got rid of her blouse, throwing it amusedly against the surface of the deck.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zinnia asked, laughing.

“Getting naked.”

And Zinnia was expecting that to just be a thing that she’d said. She knew she was wrong as soon as Olivier’s underwear also got lost in the pool of her clothing. And seeing her like this, completely nude in the sunset light, made her feel a calm inside that she’d been looking for elsewhere.

“_And _jumping onto the Selenic Ocean,” Olivier announced, two seconds prior to leaping overboard onto the sea. The splash resounded in Zinnia’s ears like the sound that signals the beginning of a race. She ran to the gunwale and leaned towards the cloud of saltwater from which Olivier emerged, her blonde hair darker and plastered to her head, neck and shoulders.

“You adamantly refused to swim at the beach, told me to take a raincheck,” Zinnia said. “But you have no problem just cannon-balling onto the depths of the ocean. I understand _nothing_.”

“There’re no prying eyes here,” Olivier replied, purposely making herself float, the water levitating her body horizontally and revealing every crook and cranny of it.

Zinnia snorted, finding it funnier than it had to be, and was only able to maintain eye contact for a meek three seconds before she started taking off her sandals.

“Now, _that’s_ more like it,” Olivier said. “I could hardly believe I’d been the first of the two of us to do this.”

“Well,” Zinnia said, pulling her dress up over her head and getting rid of her underwear. “I have some decency left, thank god.”

But she jumped anyway. Jumped into the sea that had licked her feet the day before and the sea she had danced with and for during the late hours of the day. Zinnia jumped and when she got back up from under the water, Olivier was right there, smiling like a toddler in a bathtub.

Zinnia didn’t even think twice about it and just splashed water at her with all the might of her arms.

“You call that decency?” Olivier said as she tried to avoid the droplets of water hitting her in the face.

“I call this having fun.”

Much, much more fun than snowball fights could be in the depths of winter with the Briggs squad. Olivier hardly participated in any with the men, only when it was just her and Zinnia patrolling. They always had limited space and it was far too cold to be gloveless outside.

This, on the contrary, was an infinity turned ocean, the warmth of the day still residing just within reach. No matter where there went, it would still be the two of them, in a kingdom of water. There was no one for miles that Olivier would feel she had to perform certain public behavior in front of.

“Fun??? Fun?” she said, swimming closer to Zinnia and pulling her under for a second. She went down, too. The feeling of so much water, completely encasing you, was indescribable. They both came up together, their breaths the loudest thing in the world when they touched air again. “I’ll teach you the meaning of the word.”

For a while, the two of them chased each other around, splashing water and tugging at each other’s limbs playfully. Then, almost in sync with the sky, when the base of the sun hit the horizon, so bright it seemed to be giving birth to another star, both of them stopped.

Zinnia passed an arm over Olivier’s shoulders as Olivier put a hand on Zinnia’s waist and, silently, their eyes turned to the final seconds of the sunset. The immensity of the moment would fill their hearts forever. They were _here, _so far away from home, and ‘home’ was no longer a thought that existed in their minds. Whatever had been left to talk about between them, they had found words for in Haling Cove, its streets, its people, its scenery. And, in the end, they _had _moved forward. Towards what, they didn’t really know yet, there would be so much to discuss when they hit land again. But for now… all they wanted was this.

The two of them together in the Selenic Ocean, with the oranges and pinks of the sky and the final touch of yellow being slowly and gently swallowed by the dark blue of the sea.

And, for a brief moment, in the irony of a sunset the night still seemed to be hours away.

**Author's Note:**

> The song referenced at the beginning of the fic is [Classy Girls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDXfm2UMxhg) by The Lumineers.
> 
> For the beach scene, I used [The Shores of Greece](https://beach.ambient-mixer.com/the-shores-of-greece) in Ambient Mixer to really get in the mood. It’s supposed to be what could be heard, very very faintly, from the beach Olivier and Zinnia are in. Similarly, the song that’s on that track, Darmiyaan, has somehow became the song I associate with this fic. I found these [these translated lyrics](http://www.bollymeaning.com/2012/01/kuch-to-tha-tere-mere-darmiyaan-lyrics.html), if anyone’s interested: 
> 
> The quote “and we kissed beneath every streetlight” is the translation of a lyric from the Spanish song [Y nos dieron las diez](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3OtzDWBwOo), by Joaquín Sabina: “nos besamos en cada farola.”
> 
> Of course, when I typed ‘let me take you to sea’, the song [Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6krrcjHAyA) by James Horner began playing in my head. I love Titanic very enthusiastically, and it went really well with the fantasy of a scene my brain wanted to write.
> 
> Another Ambient Mixer track that I used was [Ranarri Market](https://city.ambient-mixer.com/ranarri-market) for the scene when Olivier buys the ship. I haven’t really used this sort of thing to get inspired to write in years, but it’s really agreeing with me lately.
> 
> The music that just kept playing in my head during the very last scene is [Princess Zelda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjV6bnzQW9U) by Eric Buchholz (many thanks to [Artemispolarbear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemispolarbear/pseuds/Artemispolarbear) for the Zelda music rec <3)
> 
> If I’m not mistaken, all those songs are already included in the [ Adversity playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7jk1aGHIXadEgocQhYIEBz) on Spotify.
> 
> Obol, Chalybes (including Haling Cove), Novorbem, and the Selenic Ocean are all inventions of mine. I’ve a bigass map expansion I made of the little bits Arakawa gave us, with lots of new countries and seas. Maybe next year I’ll finally have enough free time to finish the digital version and upload it :D


End file.
